tue 05/11/2024

Ballets Russes

The Bartered Bride, Garsington Opera review - brilliant revival of a comedy of cruelty

Smetana’s enchanting bitter-sweet comedy is probably on the danger-list for cancellation by the modern guardians of our moral sanctity. The plot hinges, like Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, on the cash-sale of the hero’s bride (in Hardy, the wife...

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Classical CDs: Toyshops, begging gods and a good year for Austrian music

 Mahler: Symphony No. 4 Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Semyon Bychkov,with Chen Reiss (soprano) (Pentatone)Semyon Bychkov’s Mahler 4 is the first volume of a projected cycle from an orchestra with a surprisingly small Mahler discography. Mahler...

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The deathless Alicia Alonso, in person

The magnificent, controversial Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso, who asserted that she would live to 200, died yesterday in Havana, aged nearly 99. Legends are always well protected by their own mythology, yet in 2004, when attending the Havana Ballet...

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Natalia Goncharova, Tate Modern review - a prodigious talent

The times they are a-changin’. On show at the Barbican is a retrospective of Lee Krasner’s stunning paintings and, for the first time ever, Tate Modern is hosting two major shows of women artists. At last, the achievements of great women are...

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Sacre, Sasha Waltz and Guests, Sadler's Wells

What dancemaker wouldn't want to tackle Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) at some point? Just as the Stravinsky score changed music, the original Ballets Russes production changed dance - and was then, conveniently, so completely forgotten...

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The Rite of Spring & Petrushka, Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, Sadler's Wells

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring captures the pulsing terror of seasonal change, the relentless onward drive of nature that brings death closer even as life burns at its most ferocious. The 1913 première of the ballet created by Vaslav Nijinsky...

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Remembering Derek Jarman

It was very odd, in January this year, to see that Super-8 camera of Derek’s in a glass case and a few open notebooks in his beautiful italic handwriting in some other glass cases in the same room. There were five or six small-scale projections from...

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Men in Motion III, London Coliseum

Two years, nearly to the day, since its first London outing, Ivan Putrov’s all-male ballet showcase, Men in Motion, is back in town. Does the damning of that 2012 première as too slight still sting Putrov?  Men in Motion III seems designed to...

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Chagall: Modern Master, Tate Liverpool

“Charming” is undoubtedly a double-edged word. Along with its perfumed allure, it carries a whiff of insincerity, of something slick and not quite earned. Add “whimsical” and you know you’re in danger of saccharine overload.  Chagall is both,...

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Rare footage of ballet legend Anna Pavlova in BFI season

The legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova is to be celebrated in a season of rare footage of her life and career at the BFI in August. A longtime Londoner who was buried near her Highgate home in 1931, the dancer is the subject of a book, Anna Pavlova:...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Sandy Denny, Kevin Coyne, France Gall

Sandy Denny: Sandy (Deluxe Edition), Like An Old Fashioned Waltz (Deluxe Edition), Rendezvous (Deluxe Edition)Graham FullerSandy Denny completists unable to drop a thousand to acquire the now scarce 2010 19-disc box set can fill their collections...

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Russian Ballet Icons Gala: Celebrating Anna Pavlova, London Coliseum

Fokine, the founding choreographer of the Ballets Russes, wrote on Anna Pavlova’s death, “Pavlova will be the dream of many generations, a dream of beauty, of the gladness of movement.” The superb array of international stars of ballet last night...

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