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Sacto1654, on Dec 14 2008, 09:50 PM, said:
You're right--there aren't that many recent ballet performances on DVD. The only good ones I've seen with my own eyes are the 2006 performance of Swan Lake filmed at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia (available on DVD and now Blu-Ray disc), which is probably the ONLY officially-released film in the West we'll see of many of the current Kirov/Mariinsky Ballet stars and the 2007 (?) performance of Sleeping Beauty by the Royal Ballet, which became available on DVD earlier this year.
But if you're talking performances on TV, you're in far better luck. If you have a DirecTV subscription and can get access to the international feed of VGTRK's RTR Planeta channel, they frequently show a lot of the programming from VGTRK's Kultura channel, and that has a HUGE number of ballet performances from the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. (I have a neighbor who has taped a number of programs off the RTR Planeta international channel and I was able to see the 50th anniversary gala for Bolshoi Ballet legends Vladimir Vasiliev and Ekaterina Maximova that happened a few months ago and even the special gala performance of Don Quixote honoring Maya Plisetskaya from October 2005.
)
But if you're talking performances on TV, you're in far better luck. If you have a DirecTV subscription and can get access to the international feed of VGTRK's RTR Planeta channel, they frequently show a lot of the programming from VGTRK's Kultura channel, and that has a HUGE number of ballet performances from the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. (I have a neighbor who has taped a number of programs off the RTR Planeta international channel and I was able to see the 50th anniversary gala for Bolshoi Ballet legends Vladimir Vasiliev and Ekaterina Maximova that happened a few months ago and even the special gala performance of Don Quixote honoring Maya Plisetskaya from October 2005.
)Livestation.com connects to Kultura and to RTR Planeta. I didn't know about them until I read this post; thought "what the heck" give it a try. The connection for Kultura was smooth. The Planeta was slow. With Livestation it depends on the time of day...also one has to know when something is on. Livestation picks up most of the major French channels.
