The Seasons: Thierry Malandain, Andrés Gabetta, and The Royal Opera Orchestra of Versailles

It turns out you can pack Versailles into a suitcase—bows, scores, and all

Yesterday brought the rare delight of Thierry Malandain’s The Seasons, performed by Malandain Ballet Biarritz with the live orchestra of L’Opéra Royal du Château de Versailles and violinist–conductor Andrés Gabetta. A project as fleeting as it was unique, shown only once at the George Enescu International Festival: until now the ballet had been danced only to a recording, while Gabetta had played Vivaldi and Guido separately. Here, for the first time, everything came together.

                                         Photos by Petrica Tanase

The setting was the gleaming new hall of the National Theatre Bucharest “Ion Luca Caragiale,” yet it felt as though I were seated in a gilded box of the Royal Opera of Versailles. The baroque orchestra sounded uncannily authentic, and Andres Gabetta seemed to belong to another century. The unusually high orchestra pit gave us a clear view of both musicians and conductor; when Gabetta turned to face the audience, violin in hand, the pull of his playing was impossible to resist—though resist one had to, for the stage itself was just as captivating.

Conceived by Laurent Brunner, director of Château de Versailles Spectacles, and Stefan Plewniak, violinist and music director of the Royal Opera of Versailles, this Seasons intertwines Vivaldi’s familiar score with the little-known Quattro Stagioni dell’anno by Giovanni Antonio Guido, a contemporary and compatriot of the “Red Priest.” Both composers worked at Versailles in the early eighteenth century, and scholars suggest Guido may have inspired Vivaldi. Guido’s music, elegant and tinged with melancholy, adds a fascinating counterpoint to Vivaldi’s exuberance.

                                    Photos by Petrica Tanase

Guido’s Seasons first appeared in 1716 alongside a series of four oval landscapes by Watteau. Like Vivaldi, he explored the dialogue between man and nature. Both composed against the backdrop of ballet’s rapid growth in France—only decades after Louis XIV had founded the Paris Opera Ballet in 1661.

But that’s just the backdrop. Malandain’s choreography brims with invention—solos, duets, but above all ensemble work. At times four couples appear (the seasons), at times twelve dancers (the months), and at times twenty-two, against Jorge Gallardo’s slightly ominous backdrop of black feathered leaves. Perhaps the most arresting moment comes when dancers appear in flesh-colored tights with black sleeves that morph into leaves: like modern Venus de Milos, torsos bare, arms dissolving into shadows. Antiquity tries on baroque, baroque slips into the twenty-first century. Malandain even creates a new herbarium—not of pressed plants, but of movements imprinted in memory like delicate silhouettes on silk. Each season unfolds like a page from a diary: Summer transparent and insolent, Winter taut with icy breath, Autumn weary but waltzing, Spring teetering between laughter and tears. The seasons here are not weather, but states of soul.

                                    Photos by Petrica Tanase

Andrés Gabetta, part conductor, part violinist, appears almost mythological—an Orpheus leading dancers and orchestra alike. His violin cuts like a winter wind, then caresses like wine in the Versailles gardens. The orchestra plays as if continuing a conversation begun under Louis XIV, a dialogue we are privileged to overhear. Nature rustles through the score, turning the stage into a greenhouse where sounds bloom and fade. Then again, perhaps they do not fade—Malandain’s ballet, like the music itself, is about eternal return: each gesture is time that will come again. Not a calendar, but a wheel of life— groaning, hesitating, yet unstoppable.

You sit, astonished, watching bodies contain the passing of a year, a violin coax sun and snow, dancers turn into months, into leaves, into antique Venuses with arms swallowed by black tunnels of sleeves. Yes, the sleeves again— things you cannot forget! They flap, whisper, shed themselves as if weary of costume life. From season to season costumes change into brocade jackets and pannier gowns, straight out of court theatre; lighting shifts from muted greens and oranges to reds, blues, and black. As for the black sleeves, are they leaves or wings? Life, death, or renewal? Take your pick.

                                      Photos by Petrica Tanase

As the music turns, so do the dancers: flight and leaf-fall give way to formal baroque gestures—bows, curtsies, courtly steps drawn from French tradition. Malandain has said he wanted to question humanity’s place in nature and the impact of climate change. The dancers’ black wing-leaves, he explained, signal their bond with both nature and the divine.

These Seasons carry the scent of French gardens, echo Watteau’s canvases, and recall belle danse, where body and spirit moved in balance. Two composers spar and laugh across centuries, and the dancers trace their quarrel in geometry: lines and spirals, duets and whirls. Angular shoulders, bent knees, sudden falls, twitching gestures—and then grace, buoyancy, elegance, airborne leaps, smooth lifts. Vivaldi bursts forth with instinct; Guido smiles with baroque sophistication. Together they form something else entirely—a “poetic fantasy,” as Malandain calls it. Music and bodies breathe as one, and the stage becomes a garden where the seasons simply decide to live a life of their own.

                                     Photo by Petrica Tanase