classical ballet
judith.flanders
It has been said that Mozart, so prodigiously talented so young, seemed to be merely a vessel through which God, or the music of the spheres, or whichever higher being one chooses, channelled the sounds of heaven. So, too, sometimes, does Balanchine appear to be a vessel through which music is channelled, to take solid form in front of our eyes. And never more so when the music in question is Tchaikovsky.Jewels can be a tricky piece to get right. In less than 90 minutes, it covers 150 years of dance in three plotless acts: mid-19th century French Romanticism, via Fauré, for Emeralds; American Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Money, love, professional jealousy - the three undying motives for personal crime, and all three were present in the Bolshoi Ballet acid trial. An international public that scoffed happily at the OTT ballet horror-show that was the film Black Swan was suddenly sobered up by real-life events that needed no cinematographers and screenwriters. A dancer had commissioned a criminal with a murder conviction to seriously hurt his boss, the artistic director of the great Bolshoi Ballet, Russia’s most glamorous, skilled and commercially desirable cultural export, and the boss was now scarred and near- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Even by the grand Guignol standards of Russian ballet 2013, this week has been eventful. The trial of the Bolshoi dancer for attacking his boss with acid finally began on Tuesday, and with incredible, tension-ratcheting synchrony, the controversial, mouthy Bolshoi star who was fired in the summer for machinating against his leaders has been appointed to head Russia's world-famous ballet school.To add still more salt to the seasoning, the same mouthy Bolshoi star will be appearing - it was revealed on Tuesday - as a witness on behalf of the accused dancer in the trial. The Brooks-Coulson Read more ...
judith.flanders
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Sometimes, of course, it’s even better to be both. And Birmingham Royal Ballet, in their all-too-brief London season, have been both lucky and good. Lucky, because they have Peter Wright’s little jewel of a production to dance; and good because, well, they’re good in it.The first night cast of Jenna Roberts (right, in a previous performance, as the Lilac Fairy), now happily settled back at full health after a long injury break, and Iain Mackay (below left) is as sleek and smooth and elegant as the production. Roberts’s Aurora is gracious Read more ...
judith.flanders
The opening night of the autumn season brings a gala first night, Carlos Acosta’s staging of Petipa’s Hispano-Russo-Austro-Hungarische castanet-fest, Don Quixote, with starry leads (Marianela Nuñez and Acosta himself), a very obviously expensive new production courtesy of West End musical designer Tim Hatley (Shrek and Spamalot), and an amped-up re-orchestrated score from conductor Martin Yates.Acosta (pictured below by Johan Persson) has previously mounted shows of his own – Tocororo, A Cuban Tale was the most prominent – but Don Q is his first outing in the classical repertoire, and for the Read more ...
judith.flanders
The Bolshoi’s summer season in London has so far been straight-down-the-line trad: Swan Lake as an opener, Bayadère, Sleeping Beauty. Now, however, with Balanchine’s Jewels, they’ve at least dipped a pointe shoe into the 20th century, if rather cautiously.Jewels is, to be blunt, a beast of a ballet to get right – or, to change metaphor, it is a will o’ the wisp, ambiguous in style, constantly shape-shifting before our eyes. To get to grips with it, from either side of the footlights, is not simple, and neither the company (who acquired this work only last year) nor the audience was entirely Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Bolshoi Theatre reopened in late autumn 2011 after a problematic six-year refurbishment said to have cost a tidy billion dollars, many times its original estimate thanks to corruption - it needed a corker of a ballet premiere to pop the eyes of a cynical Russian public, and it set upon a new staging of The Sleeping Beauty. This was also problematic, as three years earlier it had been promised to the then ballet director Alexei Ratmansky, who had soon afterwards resigned his job, wretched and miserable with the corrosive relationships within the theatre. And it was reassigned to the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The mighty adorable Carlos Acosta is at the London Coliseum this week in all his might and all his adorableness - four times, you may like to know, he appears without his shirt on. This is relevant, because it’s not the preening bare-chestedness of a showbiz egomaniac like some I could name, it demonstrates the desire of a man to shed trappings, to be himself at his most unadorned, adorning the art he loves: classical ballet.Acosta likes to do a summer show for London, though not necessarily directly against the Bolshoi Ballet residency. However, this has great appeal, being a gallery of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Everyone must be wishing the Bolshoi Ballet a swift return to company health after the tragic events of this year, as well as a return to physical health by their horribly injured artistic director - in the circumstances it’s heroic that they have got to London at all, let alone in such good performing order as they showed last night. Many of us will be wishing they had got themselves a worthy production of Swan Lake too, but they haven’t, and so the first night of their three-week visit to Covent Garden was not the glowing triumph it should be in the film script.Those Russian women have a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So last night the Royal Ballet’s first couple, at shockingly short notice, gave their last performance with the company, in MacMillan’s Mayerling, a terrifying, piteous experience that I know I’ll never see surpassed. Johan Kobborg and Alina Cojocaru have blessed this millennium, both artists who used the lightness of their natural physical abilities to tear into dark emotional places, and who last night tore the Royal Opera House’s sell-out crowd apart. Kobborg the Light-of-foot, Cojocaru the Light-of-heart, dancing away in the blackest, bleakest ballet of all.Mayerling’s demands on the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
General booking for the Bolshoi Ballet's Covent Garden season this summer opens on Tuesday (9 April), and the company has at last announced its intended casting. However, it should always be borne in mind that, as Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo habitually announce before every performance, "in accordance with strict Russian tradition, there may be changes". The notable news is the absence of two male names from the roster - Nikolai Tsiskaridze, who is currently taking the Bolshoi Theatre to court over disciplinary action in the wake of the acid attack on Bolshoi director Sergei Filin, Read more ...
judith.flanders
It’s not often you go to a ballet to watch a history lesson unfold, but Laurencia, the 1939 Soviet ballet choreographed by Vakhtang Chabukiani, gives us exactly that, and a gripping one under the froth and fun.Based on the 17th-century playwright Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, Laurencia tells of the wicked ruler Don Fernán, who spots the lovely Laurencia (Natalia Osipova) as she is dancing with her fiancé, Frondoso (Ivan Vasiliev). Frondoso protects her at some risk to himself, and instead Don Fernán and his men assault their friend Jacinta (the lovely Oksana Bondareva).In Act II, the Don Read more ...