15 replies to this topic

[Giannina]

rg:

or anyone else:

Do you have the entire cast listing for the TV broadcast of ABT's La Bayadere in 1980 (or thereabouts)?  I cut off my taping before the credits appeared and I'm wondering if they listed others besides the leads?  I even like the corps members listed.  Thanks.

Giannina

[rg]

PBS telecast rarely, if ever, listed the secondary and corps de ballet roles in its presentaions. This is how the linc.cent.library lists its copy of the telecast, undoubtedly from the tape's on-screen credits:

La bayadère [videorecording] / WNET-TV ; choreography by Natalia Makarova after Marius Petipa ; music by Ludwig Minkus.
(125 min.) : sd., col.
Telecast on WNET-TV's Live from Lincoln Center on May 28, 1980 from the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, N.Y.
Scenery, PierLuigi Samaritani ; costumes, Theoni V. Aldredge ; lighting, Toshiro Ogawa.
Host: Pia Lindstrom.
Natalia Makarova, Act I, and Marianna Tcherkassky, Act II and III (Nikiya), Anthony Dowell (Solor), Victor Barbee (Radjah Dugmanta), Cynthia Harvey (Gamzatti), Alexander Minz (High Brahmin), Danilo Radojevic (Head Fakir and Bronze Idol), and members of American Ballet Theatre. Makarova replaced by Tcherkassky in Acts II and III due to a knee injury.
Conductor, John Lanchbery.
Intermission interview with Makarova between Act II and III omitted on this tape.

somewhere in my files i have the house prog. from the performance but i can't easily now put lay hands on it and in any case it would be a lot to keyboard.

[Giannina]

Thanks, rg.

Giannina

[rg]

the house prog. i've found has johann renvall listed as the bronze idol tho' he may have been substituted as the library notes radojevic.
solor's friend was frank smith.
elaine kudo and janet shibata led the djampe dance.
charles maple and gregory osborne led the waltz.
david cuevas and michael owen were the men in the pas d'action.
the pas d'action women are named as follows: nancy collier, yoko ichino, hilda morales, cheryl yeager & lisa de rivere, lise houlton, lucette katerndahl, janet shibata.
the lead shades were: lisa de ribere, kristine elliott and janet shibata.
aya was ruth mayer.
hope this helps.

[Giannina]

It sure does.  Thanks again.

Giannina

[citrus]

Is this available on videos? I've heard about the performance, but couldn't find it anywhere.

[Giannina]

I'm not sure but I don't think so.  My copy is directly from TV.  Interesting performance:  Makarova began in the starring role but was injured so Marianne Tcherkassky took over for her in Acts II and III.

Giannina

[citrus]

Giannina, how unfortunate! I hope one day these TV programs will find their way to commercial release. Just to think how many great performances I've missed.  

Edited by citrus, 25 August 2003 - 03:49 PM.

[rg]

no matter where we all start, we all feel the weight of all the perfs. we've missed.
luckily w/ these video records there are ways to catch up in some small ways.
as giannina notes, this particular video, telecast as 'live from lincoln center' in 1980, is not now available commercially. i suppose before things get better they may even get a tad worse, or at least somewhat more frustrating, as some titles that began life as telecasts and that were ONCE available commercially - i.e. makarova and nagy in ABT swanlake and makarova and baryshnikov in ABT giselle - are now no longer available, but we can live in hope.
my hope is that w/ the popularity of DVD we'll see a spike in an effort to release any no. of perfs. from the television archives to the commercial dvd market.
i'm grateful, btw, to you giannina, for making me seek out my house prog. from the BAYADERE telecast date. i try to save the update slips stuffed into the programs regarding cast changes and to hand correct my programs. in this case, however, i have no note of any change regarding the bronze idol dancer. and yet the library lists radojevic while the printed prog. says renvall. i'll have to dig out my tape someday and see if the library is correct and if so correct my prog. or if the library is mistaken and leave my prog. alone.
so many details, so little time...

[Giannina]

To tell you the truth, rg, it doesn't look like either one of them.  (Age playing tricks with me?  Naaah!)

Giannina

[Mme. Hermine]

the announcer does say it's radojevic.

[rg]

well i'm convincing myself that both the library and the announcer are correct and that the house program should have been corrected. i have miraculously located the tape and find that even under all that gold paint and in that rather dark stage light, it is indeed d.r. and NOT the intended dancer, who was first-cast, johann renvall. (if mem. serves j.r. was more spritely and liquid than d.r. in the aerial choreography of what we later learned was choreographed by nikolai zubkovsky.)
as i recall, during the telecast, i chose to watch the performance in the met's specially set up television room on, i think, the grand tier level, rather than in the auditorium, to see just how the production was being translated to the tube. (i know for certain that i did this 'experiment' for the first, and only, 'live from lincoln center' telecast during balanchine's tenure at nycb - coppelia - and i think the process was repeated for abt at the met, tho the new york state theater sequestered the press in theater's lower level, which had the feeling of wartime bunker. if mem. serves i decided to watch the all-petipa evening at abt on a colleague's television in brooklyn, some remove from the event taking place in manhattan.)

[R S Edgecombe]

Oh my prophetic soul (again!). I had always thought that the golden idol might not have been Minkus, or, if Minkus, very souped-up. Could you please give us Zubkovsky's dates, RG, if you have them? I shall listen again closely and see if I detect any non-Minkusian features that might point to a gusset. I also have me doobts aboot the fakir dance at the wedding. Is there any evidence of choreographic insertion here too? A Gorsky/Simon affaire, perhaps?

[rg]

nikolai aleksandrovich zubkovsky (25 xi 11, smolensk - 3 vi 71, leningrad)
bronze idol or 'bazhok' = 'little god' choreographed in 1948, tho' this is not such news, i believe it was first given in a DancingTimes article from the 1970s, and i include it in the 'bayadere' chapter of my book, p. 370.
if mem. serves i THINK marc h. might have identified the music some time back. but i could be hallucinating, i know he gave the ident. of some interpolation but i'm not sure if this was it or if it was for the music of solor's solo in the 'last' act - once soviet ballet's second act - of bayderka.
i think n.z. may have been the husband of the famed leningrad ballerina and teacher inna zubkovsky, she of memorable - to those lucky enough to have seen here in nyc [i WASN'T one of them] - lilac fairy performances.
i'm not sure what you mean by fakir dance in 'wedding' scene. do you mean the sacred fire first scene? or ???
i bought a book in russian on nikolai z in st. petersburg in 1995. from what little i can glean from it, it would seem this dancer might well have had some strong link to the presentation of the 'slave' pas de deux from 'le corsaire' by vaganova, the one (or very like the one nureyev put on the map). but i can't say for certain.
hope this makes some sense.

[R S Edgecombe]

Thanks very much, RG. I meant to see if the Music College had yr bk on Friday, but it slipped my mind amid all the other tasks I had set myself--which is often the pattern of my shopping. Clearly I must start taking lists to the library as well as to the supermarket. I shall certainly order it and read it if it isn't. Just to confirm, the title is Ballet 101, isn't it? The only Bayadere I know well is Nureyev's, though I did see the first BBC Kirov telecast with Komleva in the late 70s--an occasion when I tried so hard to commit as many of the steps to memory as I could while the ballet was unspooling that panic issued in virtual memory loss! In the Nureyev version, which mightn't tally with Makarova's ABT (oops, I've just remembered that I have also seen part of a tape of the RB version, which filled me with such musical revulsion that I had to abandon it. Lanchbery's text for Nureyev is less flagrantly dreadful)--to resume after that rude interruption, in Nureyev's version, the fakirs come to Gamzatti's wedding celebrations and do a dance in St Petersburg ethnic idiom, to tomtom accompaniment. That's the dance I mean. Seems too Dionysian for Petipa by far, though the music itself isn't so far removed, I suppose, from the A minor Magyar dance in the Act II divertissement of DQ. And, come to think of it, the blaring idol music could have come from the same hand that wrote the march episodes to the galop finale of DQ Act II. So I need to think long and hard about the whole matter. I shall email MH and ask him if he'd be kind enough to clarify what the music was that he identified.