Yuri Grigorovich obituary: Master of the Bolshoi Ballet
From The Red Shoes to Black Swan, the image of the angry, uncompromising ballet master has been well mined in film but never more frighteningly embodied in reality than by Yuri Grigorovich.
Dwarfed by the tall and athletic dancers favoured by the pantheon of the art form in Russia, the 5ft former dancer was, at times, a tyrannical leader of the Bolshoi Ballet from 1964 to 1995. And though with no false modesty he declared in his autobiography, 'Yuri Grigorovich is considered to be the greatest living choreographer in the world of ballet', it was a view shared by many connoisseurs on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Grigorovich's magnum opus as a choreographer was Spartacus, in which Aram Khachaturian's colossal, pounding music
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