volcanohunter
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I guess I would answer that in 2014 there was the "letter of the 511" signed by figures from the worlds of arts and entertainment, including the heads of nearly every major cultural institution in Russia. For them it was, no doubt, a condition of keeping their jobs. There were also a few keeners, such as Zakharova, Ivan Vasiliev, Gerzmava, Matsuev, Spivakov, Bashmet. But there were many, many more individual performers who didn't sign, apparently, without detriment to their careers. This time "Team Putin" included about 700 representatives from different walks of life, so the list of representatives from the arts was much shorter. In that sense these are people who really, really want to flourish, à la Gergiev, who now has control of 9 venues in Russia, with a tenth under construction. They may be gunning for top jobs. They may be true believers. Most of them are the usual suspects. The presence of Ildar Abdrazakov was notable because up until this point he hadn't been a signatory or official campaigner. Apparently, he's now decided to say goodbye to his foreign career.
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National Ballet of Ukraine principal Kateryna Kukhar posted a video of her performance of La Sylphide on December 14th being interrupted by an air raid siren. She writes that it was the sixth such alarm that day. Apparently the performance was completed once the alarm had passed, but this is why the opera house can sell only 400 tickets per performance; that's how many audience members can fit into the theater's bomb shelter. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C03lxxOt0Wt/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
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Right now subscriptions are on sale for half price, $74.50 for a year. That would work out to $6.21 per month. You can browse the available titles in the library and decide whether there's enough there to make the investment worth your while. Admittedly, there are a lot more concerts there than ballets, and lord knows there's a ton of legit classical music to be had on YouTube - more than I could hope to watch. So I think it boils down to whether the platform has specific titles that you would like to watch.
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The intermissions have been edited out of the stream, which would suggest that it will stay up for a while.
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Medici is giving me an immediate replay, so for now it's available on demand. I think Ratmansky's Coppélia is quite marvelous, unmistakably his choreography, but structurally unchanged. Coppelius' house stands at stage left, there's traditional mime (poorly filmed here), the "blinking" music is used for blinking... The most surprising changes are giving the Prayer music to a male dancer in a Grecian tunic--the only figure who looked out of place in a central European context--but then the allegorical variations don't appear to be especially allegorical; and Franz and Swanilda sharing her wedding variation. I can understand that. None of the usual pieces of music used for Franz's variation is especially satisfactory. Perhaps the third act doesn't feel as finished as the first, which has amazing vivacity, but there was probably a race to opening night. I was happy to see Nicole Nicoletta Manni was Swanilda, because in recent years she's developed a habit of "luxuriating" in movement and dragging behind the music, and here she couldn't and didn't. Also, during La Scala's World Ballet Day stream Timofej Andrijashenko seemed to have trouble with Ratmansky's intricate rhythms, but all that seems to have been resolved. Both he and Narvin Turnbull in the Prayer variation did a much better job of batterie than Artemy Belyakov and Alexey Putintsev did in Ratmansky’s Giselle. I also particularly enjoyed Maria Celeste Losa in the Work variation. I don't think that any company performing the Petipa/Cecchetti version should replace it, but this would be a very fine choice for companies that aren't.
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Since this will no doubt be relevant for continued sanctions, yesterday at Moscow's Zaradye Concert Hall a group of some 700 individuals nominated Vladimir Putin to run for reelection. https://apnews.com/article/russia-vladimir-putin-presidential-election-nomination-independent-b01a4aeddb73dc201527c086824dedee The members of "Team Putin" who put forward the nomination include Valery Gergiev, Nikolai Tsiskaridze, Ildar Abdrazakov, Hibla Gerzmava, Yuri Bashmet, Nikita Mikhalkov and also figure skaters Tatiana Navka (who is married to Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov) and Evgeny Plushenko, who described Putin as the greatest politician in the world. The list of nominators also included actors, pop singers and television personalities, who are less familiar to foreign audiences. https://zavtra.ru/events/komanda_putina_(v_tekste_privoditsya_chast_spiska)_edinoglasno_podderzhala_samovidvizhenie_putina P.S. Photos show that Denis Matsuev was also present.
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National Ballet of Canada 2023-2024 season
volcanohunter replied to California's topic in National Ballet of Canada
The Nutcracker has just begun, and already injuries are throwing a big spanner into the works. Jurgita Dronina is out for the entire run, and Koto Ishihara's first appearance has been delayed by a week. At the moment Genevieve Penn Nabity is scheduled to dance 10 Sugar Plum Fairies, plus three Snow Queens. -
Regardless of whether ABT ever dances there, it's marvelous that the theater has been rescued and restored.
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National Ballet of Canada 2023-2024 season
volcanohunter replied to California's topic in National Ballet of Canada
Onegin, 25 November 2023, matinee Svetlana Lunkina’s immersive and multilayered acting makes pretty much all other ballet acting look simplistic and superficial. Her Tatiana is convincingly bookish and sensitive, as though she’s really reading, not staring into a prop. She’s palpably infatuated with Onegin. She doesn’t merely gaze at him doe-eyed; it’s clear that he thrills her. If anything interfered with the “mirror” duet, it was the sets. Between the desk, the “mirror” and the bed, there was practically no room left over to maneuver. More than once Lunkina and Larkin Miller had to hold a pose and wait for the music for move along because they had simply run out of space. Still, in every overhead lift I marveled at the beauty of her legs, and the "slingshot" lifts were especially spectacular. I hadn’t seen a ballerina look so exultant in the backwards torch lift since Veronica Tennant 35 years ago. Lunkina was masterful in the second act. The day before Jurgita Dronina had run into trouble after Onegin attempted to return her letter: she buried her face in her hands and her torso began to shake violently, which led a few people in the audience to giggle. Instead Lunkina made sure that the audience would see her features fall and her eyes well up with tears. Her variation didn’t look desperate or needy, but like a duty she had to perform and somewhat distractedly. (She saved her desperation for the duel scene.) When she returned to the stage composed again, she poignantly wiped away a final tear. What was also devastating was how hurt she looked as she watched Onegin flirt with Olga. I agree that in the third act her duet with her husband (Donald Thom) is formal rather than rapturous. They are dancing in a ballroom with everyone watching, after all, and she responds by offering classical perfection and poise. This contrasts all the more strongly with how she repeats parts of the duet with him in the second scene. No doubt I am repeating myself from seven years ago, but it is fitting that the final duet is set to Francesca da Rimini, because Lunkina does appear as though she is enduring hell and her soul is being torn to pieces. But I cursed the presence of the idiotic stove that Santo Loquasto placed at stage right. During one lift I feared that Lunkina’s legs would collide with its chimney. (And the fact that Loquasto placed the "door" to the room upstage center, not stage right, as it was originally, means that every Onegin needs to make a sharp turn to stage left as he barrels out the room, or else he risks colliding with the doorframe.) Toward the end of the duet tears were streaming down Lunkina’s face, her body looked as though it were about to break, and when the curtain came back up, it was obvious that she was completely spent. It had been many years since I had cried at a performance of Onegin, but I did this time. The real crying shame is that she has had only two opportunities to perform the ballet over the past seven years. That is madness. I can understand why Reid Anderson cast Miller as Onegin. Miller is reminiscent of Anderson himself in the role. Of course, it’s still early going for him, but Miller’s interpretation is straightforward—his Onegin is haughty and self-absorbed. He didn’t overact, he didn’t drop his partner. No doubt with time his first-act variation and everything else will become more assured. I’m not entirely convinced of Miller’s danseur noble credentials, though. There were a lot of fake arabesques. I thought Tirion Law was charming as Olga. I also thought that Siphesihle November fared very well in the first scene, perhaps more jaunty as Lensky than is typical, but jumping easily and very high, managing all the partnering. His tall crown of braids was coaxed into something like a 19th-century hairstyle, and overall it improved the perception of his proportions. November is very short, hence the hairstyle he usually wears, and I worried that when he challenged Miller’s Onegin to a duel, it might appear unintentionally comical, but it didn’t. Then I realized a bigger danger was that he had to lift Lunkina, who is about the same height, during the duel scene. I was afraid she might end up on the stage floor in a split, but she didn’t. What I wasn’t convinced by was his performance of the pre-duel monologue, which was too reminiscent of angsty music-video dancing, if I can put it that way. I especially appreciated Stephanie Hutchison as the Nurse, for not turning her into a caricature of an old woman. And there was good humor, not overplayed, in the party scene, when Alexandra MacDonald’s tall Madame Larina led a mazurka with the much smaller Scott McKenzie. -
I have a feeling ABT would be scared away from that many seats. How are the sightlines? Old movie houses were built on the assumption that people would be looking up at a screen, not at stage level. On the other hand, the proscenium may be quite low, if it was built to frame a film screen. Not that old cinemas have four or five rings of seats, but the key elements of the sets have to be visible.
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As of January 1st, LaScala.tv is launching a subscription service. A list of 21 livestreams for 2024 has been published, and it includes operas, concerts and a vocal recital, but no ballets. https://www.teatroallascala.org/en/lascalatv-2024-programme.html At €15/month, it is more expensive than some of its competitors, though the number of livestreams is greater than what Paris Opera Play offers, for example, and ROH Stream doesn't livestream at all. https://lascala.tv/en/listsubscription Apparently streams from past seasons will be included in the subscription. I am curious to see whether a streaming season with an equal number of operas and concerts will fly, given that so many orchestras stream on YouTube free of charge.
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I was surprised that ABT couldn't make a go of The Nutcracker in Brooklyn. But those NEA surveys do show that proportional rates of audience participation are higher in North Dakota than they are in New York State. There are a ton of shows on offer in New York, but it's entirely possible, that a smaller percentage of the population actually partakes. The cost of living is very high, the commutes can be hellish. So perhaps NYCB's 47 shows × 2,586 seats = 121,542 tickets actually saturate the Nutcracker market.
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Realistically, the last time I saw a Nutcracker "out of season" was in Japan (October 2017). In Hamburg, where John Neumeier reset the ballet as Marie's birthday party in an attempt to make it a year-round ballet, it is now performed only at Christmastime, sharing the period with the more explicitly thematic Christmas Oratorio. Even the Bolshoi does a big block of Nutcrackers in December-January, otherwise performing it rarely. The truly insane queues for tickets there (for the Grigorovich production!) would indicate that the broader public now sees it as a holiday ballet. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/11/15/why-is-seeing-the-nutcracker-at-the-bolshoi-theatre-so-difficult-a83113 It isn't an annual tradition, but the Australian Ballet has also reached the point of performing it at the end of the calendar year. There the stronger tendency was not to perform the ballet at all.
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Now the Bolshoi is as toxic as the Mariinsky, so we won't get a ringside seat to watch everything going to hell anytime soon. Figuratively, a plague on both their houses. But I find these references to Urin's so-called anti-war credentials misleading. I would venture an opinion, that at the time he was scrambling to salvage the Bolshoi's co-productions with Western opera houses, which didn't work in the end. Remember that in 2014 he signed the "letter of the 511" supporting Putin's occupation of Crimea and the eastern Donbas, as did the heads of every major cultural institution in Russia, no doubt as a condition of keeping their jobs and covering all their subordinates. (People like Svetlana Zakharova and Ivan Vasiliev went out of their way to sign it as individuals.) He also publicly professed fealty to Putin on behalf of the entire theater in the wake of Evgeny Prigozhin's whatever-that-was.
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Multiple news sources are reporting that Vladimir Urin resigned his post as of 30 November. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.svoboda.org/amp/vladimir-urin-pokinul-post-direktora-boljshogo-teatra/32708873.html On his Telegram channel music critic Sergei Bulanov published a video of Urin's farewell address to the employees of the Pokrovsky Chamber Stage (absorbed into the Bolshoi Theater in 2018) following the premiere of a Cui/Stravinsky operatic double bill. He specifically says that it's his last day on the job. https://t.me/sergeibulanov/1061
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As the one-month mark of World Ballet Day approaches, and some of the videos are likely to come down, I took a look at who bagged the most viewers this year. Royal Ballet - 299,000, which is substantially fewer than last year. Paris Opera Ballet - 171,000; the company also has 43,000 views on Facebook. National Ballet of Japan - 133,000 ABT also pulled in an impressive 115,000 views for its company class. I counted 5 streams that got fewer than 1,000 views, but I won't name names.
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The Paris Opera Ballet will livestream its all-Kylián program - Stepping Stones, Gods and Dogs, Petite Mort, Sechs Tänze - on Paris Opera Play on Friday, December 15, at 20:00 CET (2:00 pm Eastern). Available on demand for 7 days for €14.90 or as part of a POP subscription. Subscriptions cost €9.90/month or €99 annually; €4.95/month for the under-28s. They come with a 7-day free trial. The on-demand library currently includes 27 ballets, 12 ballet masterclasses (Giselle rehearsals), 33 operas, 29 concerts and 24 behind-the-scenes documentaries. https://play.operadeparis.fr/en/p/jiri-kylian-evening
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National Ballet of Canada 2021-2022 season
volcanohunter replied to California's topic in National Ballet of Canada
For viewers in Canada, the four-part series Swan Song, about the staging of Karen Kain's production of Swan Lake is now available on CBC Gem. https://gem.cbc.ca/swan-song Though contrary to the site's breathless plug, the 2022 production was not "the highest-stakes opening night in the National Ballet of Canada's 70-year history." It's Swan Lake, for crying out loud. The company spent 18 years performing one of the worst productions of Swan Lake on the planet and survived. Within a few years I'm sure the company will have paid off this slightly less awful production. -
Decisions on Onegin casting are made exclusively by the Cranko estate. Notable dancers who never got to perform the piece with the Royal Ballet included Sylvie Guillem and Jonathan Cope, the latter being a real head-scratcher. The National Ballet of Canada is performing it right now with a junior soloist making his debut as Onegin and a couple of corps members dancing Lensky, ahead of more senior dancers and getting more performances than a debutant principal.
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National Ballet of Canada 2023-2024 season
volcanohunter replied to California's topic in National Ballet of Canada
This is interesting, because I saw this cast on Friday, and my impression was entirely different. I thought Guillaume Côté's dancing looked labored, his arabesque was pretty much gone and he pitched his torso far forward in an attempt to lift his leg higher. To me his Onegin was devoid of allure, his partnering was extremely bumpy, carrying Jurgita Dronina around like a sack of potatoes, and he tried to compensate by throwing his head around a lot. (I take a dim view of hair-tossers.) During Tatiana's duet with her husband he seemed mostly indifferent. Technically the third act was stronger, perhaps because the "Onegin's dreams" section was adjusted to allow him to turn to the left, and because the partnering of the final scene doesn't have to look smooth. I was surprised, though, that during the big leap from the floor, Dronina didn't actually lie down, but remained standing on one knee. Karen Kain and Xiao Nan Yu used to do this, but they are about 5'7" tall and big-boned by ballet standards, while Dronina is tiny. Perhaps Côté needed an additional day off between performances. Dronina is the best Olga I have ever seen, a complete and entirely believable person on stage, so my expectations for her Tatiana were extremely high. I was surprised to find her characterization was quite conventional. Her duet with Gremin was truly ravishing, but otherwise her interpretation wasn't especially imaginative or revealing. I don't believe that any ballerina resembles Olga in real life; she couldn't succeed in her profession with that sort of personality. But perhaps Dronina is a bit too extroverted to make Tatiana resonate convincingly. Her most individual stamp came at the end of her variation in the second act, because her final leap in the direction of Onegin's card table already looked like a cry of despair, rather than coming a second later, when he bangs his hands on the table and she runs off in tears. In her first-act duet Tina Pereira as Olga seemed to be dancing more for the audience than to her partner, which seemed odd given the solicitude of Harrison James, but in the second act she was definitely actively engaged with her onstage colleagues. The strongest performance came from James as Lensky. He wasn't Jeremy Ransom-class, and technically he wasn't quite Daniil Simkin-class either, but he was better in dancing between the pirouettes than Simkin, and certainly a superior partner. Originally this run was to have featured four Gremins, but for whatever reason, Ben Rudisin, who debuted in the role during the last run 7 years ago, will end up dancing every performance but one. If he had little time to rehearse with Dronina, it didn't show. My only quibble would be that after Tatiana's second-act variation ends in humiliation, Rudisin's Gremin gave Côté's Onegin a decidedly disapproving look as Gremin exited the stage. It seemed a little odd that several years later Gremin should have invited Onegin to his home, while neglecting to mention that, by the way, he married that young woman. Chelsy Meiss is being shunted into character roles: mothers-in-law, ex-nannies and grandmothers. Frankly, she's too young for this, and her doddering looks unconvincing. This was largely true of the elders at the second-act party as well, now that the company has shed all its character artists. Conductor David LaMarche raced through the music in spots, and the corps in the quasi-folk dance at the end of the first scene couldn't keep up with his tempos. Sorry to say that ultimately this performance left me unmoved. I had avoided Côté's Onegin up until now, and evidently I should have avoided his last performance of the role, too. P.S. I still think Santo Loquasto's redesign, particularly the color of the backdrops, is a disaster, conspiring to make the dancers, especially Lensky, invisible.