7 replies to this topic

[cubanmiamiboy]

Is this accurate...?

[carbro]

When English National Ballet (then known as London Festival Ballet) brought their Giselle to the Met in the 1980s, they included this.  It sounds like an ill-fitting interpolation, doesn't it?  Jarring.  But as I recall, program notes called it authentic.

[cubanmiamiboy]

carbro, on 15 March 2012 - 08:46 PM, said:

When English National Ballet (then known as London Festival Ballet) brought their Giselle to the Met in the 1980s, they included this.  It sounds like an ill-fitting interpolation, doesn't it?  Jarring.  But as I recall, program notes called it authentic.

Thanks a lot, carbro, for the info.  I got interested after reading a picture caption in Octavio Roca's book "Cuban ballet".  The photograph shows Alicia Alonso, Royes Fernandez and Mary Skeaping, and the caption reads:

"Alicia Alonso and Royes Fernandez with Mary Skeaping backstage in Havana.  Skeaping, who was in the National Ballet faculty, was reponsible for Alonso adding the long-lost fugue to Act II of her Giselle in the 60's"

[bart]

A 2007 review of an English National Ballet performance contains the following:

Quote

Mary Skeaping's production of Giselle, first mounted for London Festival Ballet in 1971, was the product of several years of research. Skeaping herself danced the ballet with Pavlova in the 1920s, and in recreating it worked closely with Tamara Karsavina, who performed the role in Tsarist St Petersburg.

http://www.guardian....07/jan/14/dance

Just checked with Robert Grescovic's Ballet 101.  He refers to Hilarian's fatal confrontation with the willis   "Entree d'Hilarion, Scene et Fugue des Wilis."  However, in the video being described -- Makarova and Baryshnikov, ABT, 1977 -- this music does not appear in the scene of Hilarion's fatal confrontation with the willis.  .

Does anyone know who composed the music?  Or what steps and action are danced to it?

[cubanmiamiboy]

bart, on 17 March 2012 - 05:38 AM, said:

A 2007 review of an English National Ballet performance contains the following:

Quote

Mary Skeaping's production of Giselle, first mounted for London Festival Ballet in 1971, was the product of several years of research. Skeaping herself danced the ballet with Pavlova in the 1920s, and in recreating it worked closely with Tamara Karsavina, who performed the role in Tsarist St Petersburg.

http://www.guardian....07/jan/14/dance


Who wrote the music?

just as carbro,  the music sounds to me as an interpolation, but the clip I posted claims it to be by Adam... In any case, what I know is that the Skeaping/Karsavina Cuban staging was later on substituted for the Sergueiev-for-Markova-Dolin/Sppessivtzeva version. I think it was a shame that she got rid of this rare fragment. Also, I wonder if Skeaping also staged in Cuba the other long lost Giselle/Loys Minkus interpolated PDD for ballerina Maria Gorshenkova, Act I that was only danced during the Imperial era.  If anything, it looks to me as if both fragments, the fugue and the PDD, never made it to Stepanov...

[rg]

Doug would know more authoritatively, but my understanding, such as it is, is that this music is Adam's but that it likely didn't make it to Petipa era productions of the ballet in Russia.
I believe it's on one or more recordings of the full Adam score (perhaps on the Zhuritis(sp?) releases) and not nec. noted to be an interpolation. (Hartford Ballet's version of GISELLE, for another, staged by Kirk Peterson included this fugue.)
The interpolated pas de deux is another item included on some older recordings, of which some are still only available on vinyl, but there, if mem. serves, it's clearly noted to be a later addition.

[cubanmiamiboy]

Just thought of adding this piece of info I just read...

"[Skeaping]-also included the controversial fugue in Act II - she regarded the narrative during the fugue as central to the ballet’s conflict between the supernatural and the religious. At this point in the ballet, Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, sends wave after wave of wilis (a species of vampire women who died having been jilted by faithless lovers) to lure Albrecht from the safety of the cross on Giselle's grave."

http://www.ballet.co...enb_giselle.htm

Miguel Cabrera's 1998 book "Ballet Nacional de Cuba; Medio siglo de gloria-(CNB; Half century of glory)- has pictures of Skeaping rehearsing Alonso's company in her productions of both Swan Lake and Giselle in the mid 50's.

[doug]

Yes, the fugue is by Adam and part of the original Giselle score. I believe Marian Smith explains in her book that, at least in 19th-century theater, a fugue symbolized something sinister and evil. Adam also included a fugue in Le Corsaire to depict the mutinous disagreement between Conrad and Birbanto.