The Bolshoi Resurrection

Once the pride of Moscow, the Bolshoi had become a crumbling ornamental shell. After a painstaking $720 million artisanal overhaul, the home of the world's best ballerinas can once again command an imperial audience. Here, the first look before the lights go up in October.

By GREGORY L. WHITE
WSJ

Next month the red and gold curtain goes up for the first time in six years at Moscow's legendary Bolshoi Theater, revealing a restoration that is the biggest, most meticulous overhaul the landmark building has received since it opened in 1856. Costing more than $720 million and directly supervised by the nearby Kremlin (even the deadline for the October 28 opening was set by presidential order), the project has spared no expense—from chandeliers to artisanal gold leaf and embroidered silks—in restoring the Bolshoi's grand public spaces to their original 19th-century design. Backstage has also been upgraded with sophisticated lighting and hydraulics equipment, transforming the storied cultural institution into Russia's most modern venue for opera and ballet.

Paramount to the project was that the theater be re-created in the original vision of the czars—ornately beautiful and handcrafted—so no detail was considered too expensive or painstaking. Hundreds of spruce wall panels were imported from the Austrian Alps to replace those ripped out by the Bolsheviks to make room for party congresses; decorative silk coverings were remade from scratch in a special workshop within a Moscow monastery; artisans shipped in from across Russia spent months with agate styluses rubbing more than 3,000 square feet of gold leaf onto the six tiers of seats, and tens of thousands of crystal pendants were removed, catalogued and then either restored or replaced on the dozens of chandeliers throughout the building. It's a feat that few capitals have attempted, preferring to keep historic theater buildings mainly for smaller performances while constructing new, modern houses for the full company repertoire. But when the current Bolshoi hall opened in 1856 for the coronation of Czar Alexander II, it was bigger and grander than nearly all its European contemporaries (bolshoi means "grand" in Russian), and that's how Moscow would like it to remain.

"We're learning from the mistakes of Covent Garden and La Scala," boasts Mikhail Sidorov, spokesman for Summa Capital, a Russian construction firm best known for building oil pipelines and cargo ports until the Kremlin awarded it the then-stalled Bolshoi project in 2009. (The project had originally been slated for completion in 2008, but workers found they had to replace the entire foundation, which meant carefully setting the giant structure on thousands of metal supports and pouring new concrete footings underneath. The Kremlin fired the original contractor after work all but stopped in 2009. Government auditors found millions had been misspent and prosecutors even threatened criminal charges.)

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