Royal Opera House, LondonWhen Diaghilev's Ballets Russes first presented The Firebird (L'oiseau de feu) at the Paris Opera in 1910, it was hailed as a masterpiece. As an impresario, Diaghilev saw the advantages of offering European audiences a vision of Russia as a darkly exotic realm of the imagination rather than a decaying feudal empire, so he and his artistic team reanimated a series of Slavic folk tales and sket…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PM on December 29, 2012