Royal Ballet
David Nice
Benjamin Britten would have been 99 on the day of this concert. He died aged 62, nearly six months after the premiere of a masterpiece, the 15-minute "dramatic cantata" Phaedra, ruthlessly sifting key speeches from Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine. The compression of inspired, marble-hewn ideas, the like of which few contemporary composers come anywhere near in operas of two hours’ length or more, places Phaedra on a pedestal. Many of us would be happy to admire it in isolation, especially in the company of Alice Coote, a mezzo as equal to its stature as the original interpreter, Janet Read more ...
Ismene Brown
With a reputation as the prince of unflinching emotional catharsis, Kenneth MacMillan emerged from the Royal Ballet’s triple bill marking the 20th anniversary of his death as a lord of lyricism. The new bill presents MacMillan three ways, his academic instincts, intellectual imagination and emotional vision - a bold versatility you (whisper it) almost never see from today's choreographers. And it was a surprise that the most heart-felt performance came in the elegiac melancholy of his ballet Requiem, commemorating his own death quite as evocatively as it must have originally lamented that of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's 20 years since the death, backstage at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, of a man who scripted high-wire emotions and extreme psychological states in a theatrical language that had widely been held to be the realm of sweetness and majesty. The choreographer Kenneth MacMillan brought the values of modern theatre, cinema and the sexual revolution to ballet, and his narrative daring remains unequalled by any choreographer in Britain after him. In fact, possibly cowed by his mastery in that department, choreographers after him have fled towards abstract and even asexual codes of movement Read more ...
judith.flanders
A new Liam Scarlett ballet has become an event, even as, in this case, Scarlett’s home company, the Royal Ballet, is recreating a work he choreographed last January for Miami City Ballet – the young choreographer’s first international commission.In Viscera, Scarlett continues to pay homage to his choreographic masters – previously he has tipped his hat to Ashton and MacMillan. For Miami, directed for so many decades by George Balanchine’s great muse Edward Villella, he not unnaturally looks to the American genius. His choice of music – a piano concerto by Lowell Liebermann – sets the tone, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Liam Scarlett, the young dancer whose Jack the Ripper ballet, Sweet Violets, was one of the talking points of Covent Garden last season, has been appointed full-time Artist-in-Residence at the Royal Ballet, taking up the third place in a new creative triumvirate for the company.The announcement today comes a day before his latest ballet, Viscera, is unveiled tomorrow evening in a bill that proclaims a bright new dawn of innovation and creativity at the Royal Ballet. Scarlett's ballet is being repatriated from Miami City Ballet, where he created it this year. A setting of dance to Lowell Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hans Werner Henze, the composer who died on Saturday aged 86, wrote the music for one of Margot Fonteyn's signature ballets, Ondine, a ballet about an inhuman spirit who longs to be joined to a man - but when she does, he must die. It might almost be a metaphor for the death of the thought the moment it is realised.A 1958 collaboration with Britain's major choreographer Frederick Ashton, Ondine was the first full-length ballet score to be commissioned by the emerging Royal Ballet, and it was, for the very young, and creatively fluctuating Henze, a process that confirmed his instinct that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tonight the Royal Ballet's live Swan Lake opens the most extensive season yet of live screenings to cinemas worldwide of the Royal Opera House's productions. Zenaida Yanowsky and Nehemiah Kish, in the leading roles of the Swan Queen and her evil counterpart Odile, and Prince Siegfried, will be beamed across oceans to cinema-goers in St Julians, Malta, to the Montevideo Moviecenter in Uruguay, as well as to the Apollo, Burnley and the Enfield Cineworld.The Opera House website lets you enter your country and postcode and instantly find cinemas near you that will simultaneously be screening the Read more ...
judith.flanders
The Royal Ballet’s autumn season began on Monday, but this was the eagerly awaited Swan Lake. Natalia Osipova, ex-Bolshoi, now principal with American Ballet Theater and the Mikhailovsky in St Petersburg, was making her debut as a guest with the Royal Ballet, partnered by Carlos Acosta.Osipova had, dramatically, left the Bolshoi for the smaller and less prestigious Mikhailovsky, to the puzzlement of many. But the Bolshoi streams its dancers: a certain type is classical, another is romantic, another – Osipova’s type – play soubrettes. Her Kitri in Don Quixote (first seen in London in 2007) Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The virtuoso Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova will guest with the Royal Ballet this autumn with Carlos Acosta in the opening run of Swan Lake. Osipova, whose partnership with the phenomenal Ivan Vasiliev has become the most talked-about in world ballet, will dance the double role of Odette/Odile (the White Swan and Black Swan) on 10, 13 and 25 October with the RB's Cuban star Carlos Acosta, in place of Tamara Rojo, the ballerina who becomes English National Ballet's artistic director from September.Osipova and Vasiliev caused a sensation off-stage last winter when they quit the Bolshoi to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The bells ring out for creativity in the Royal Ballet’s final production under its outgoing director, Monica Mason, and the ambition at least of the enterprise is hugely to be cheered, even if asking seven choreographers to work together is on a hiding to nothing.Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 is a cross-platform hybrid of too-rare provenance: it was germinated when the National Gallery asked three artists, Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger, to make new work responding to the three great Titian paintings about Diana and Actaeon. (These centre on the myth of the huntsman Actaeon who Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Three paintings by Titian depicting stories from Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses welcome you to the National Gallery’s exhibition Metamorphosis: Titian 2012. Diana and Callisto shows Diana casting out the pregnant nymph Callisto from her company. Diana and Actaeon depicts the young Actaeon out hunting and stumbling into a sacred grotto where Diana and her nymphs are bathing; and in The Death of Actaeon, we see the goddess exacting vengeance on the intruder by turning him into a stag to be torn to pieces by his own hounds.You may remember the public appeals that helped save these splendid paintings Read more ...