Jump to content
This Site Uses Cookies. If You Want to Disable Cookies, Please See Your Browser Documentation. ×

Drew

Senior Member
  • Posts

    4,025
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Drew

  1. The NBC camera work was dreadful--I don't think it could have been worse. Of course, this type of performance isn't easy to capture, but they could certainly have gotten better images of particular moments. When they went close on a dancer they didn't stay long enough; when they went far away they picked peculiar moments and sometimes went too far; mid-shots cut off legs or heads ... I also wished they had given general viewers a bit more explanation/commentary. I know they didn't want to "bore" viewers -- as Pozner said when explaining why he wouldn't identify the photos of the writers being featured in the literature section--but would it have been too much to say that each of the woman soloists was wearing the costume of a famous Russian ballet leading role -- Swan Queen [edited to say, dying swan], Firebird, Scheherazade? (If they wanted an American 'hook,' then they could even have noted that the Scheherazade music/story also are what inspired American gold medalists Davis/White in their free skate.) Generally, I'm not a fan of a lot of talk, but still think they could have done more to explain the images than murmur the name Diaghilev which surely meant nothing to anyone who didn't already know who he was...Of course since they were doing such a lousy job showing the images in the first place--other than the chandelier--I suppose it didn't make a difference. I was pretty disappointed when I learned, via twitter, there would be no Lopatkina. But after I saw it...less so. That said, I thought a lot of the ceremony was very beautiful--and beautifully shown on television--and enjoyed the dancing depiction of the malfunctioning snowflake from opening ceremonies. I was also mildly surprised (not in a bad way) Bach went as far as he did in commenting on violence going on right now in the world.
  2. Very sad news. I first saw him with the National Ballet of Washington--with Marilyn Burr not long after he left Hungary. Later, of course, I saw him often with ABT. He was a beautiful, seemingly natural prince with great charisma and a wonderful cavalier. The partnership with Makarova was quite special. (In my mind, I have sometimes thought of Gomez as a kind of Nagy of today.) On stage and off, he was also...well...just gorgeous as Stage Right said above.
  3. Drew

    Yulia Stepanova

    My thanks for the link as well.
  4. Drew

    Tanaquil Le Clercq

    Love the last image (that Pherank posted) from the documentary.
  5. I had no idea of any connection between Beauty in Motion and the Opening Ceremonies until reading this thread. I watched the section with Vishneva thinking it made for a lovely enough image for an Olympic opening ceremonies (the dancers...the dove...Vishneva twirling at the center) but that the creators hardly needed one of the world's great ballerinas for it. I'm a little disconcerted to learn it's actually one of her featured specialty numbers....
  6. Here is the link the Mariinsky has sent out (on Facebook at least) to the International Ballet Festival Program. Tereshkina is the opening night Sylvia. ABT's Isabella Boylston will be a guest later in week--dancing with Somova in Bayadere: http://www.mariinsky.ru/en/playbill/festivale/fest_2013_2014/ballet_fest_231/
  7. When I first saw the Mariinsky -- then Kirov -- Terekhova was the stand-out for me. A lot of balletomane attention and admiration was focused on Assylmuratova, especially in the wake of a Croce piece about her -- and not wrongly of course -- but for whatever reason Terekhova's (as it seemed to me) crystalline, yet free dancing spoke to me much more immediately. I was quite pleased when I learned that she was working with Somova.
  8. How wonderful you got to see these performances. They are high on my list of my "time travel" ballet fantasies...(Quite a while ago, we had a thread on the topic and I'm pretty sure I mentioned Babilee in Blue Bird at the top of my wish list or near it!)
  9. I was going to mention Fracci-Bruhn, Drew, but you beat me to it! The early bird catches the worm.... I would also like to underscore Maximova-Vasiliev, Fonteyn-Nureyev, Kirkland-Baryshnikov,and Ferri-Bocca, and today, Vishneva-Gomes. I am surely leaving out names that will come to me in the middle of the night. Wouldn't it be wonderful if a perfect partner could be found for Veronika Part? She is so deserving. Also, still searching for the perfect partner for David Hallberg.... Not perfect, but I think Osipova Hallberg is plenty exciting. What keeps it from the pantheon is how little they dance together--a partnership needs nurturing. I am sad to say that though I have seen Vishneva and seen Gomez, I have never seen them dance together.
  10. I re-looked over this thread--I don't think anyone mentioned Fracci-Bruhn. I would add that Makarova also had a very fine partnership with Dowell, though I also loved him with Kirkland and of course (mentioned above) Sibley. He was a great partner!
  11. I came to NY for a chance to see a mix of works new and old--some once familiar to me that I hadn't seen in a long time. But I'd like to begin by saying a word for Bouder: I thought she was fantastic in Rubies Thursday night--really made the case for it as major Balanchine (which I don't really believe it is). Her engaged facial expressions seemed entirely organic arising out of the total performance which I found powerful, sexy, and fun. I also thought she was excellent in Who Cares? on Sat afternoon. Her musical playfulness softened--or, at any rate, lightened the texture of the hard hitting showgirliness of the other lead women (Hyltin and Lowery). She certainly seemed utterly confident, but I would not say the least bit smug. In other roles, in Acheron, for example on Friday night, her extremely accomplished dancing was presented in an almost subdued way; if anything I wished she would do more to draw attention to herself. I have in the past found that in some roles she seemed more cheerleader than ballerina and in still others put too much of a damper on her personality--but in her dancing this past weekend at least I saw not only extraordinary skill but tremendous vitality. For me Dances at a Gathering has aged...I did love it at one time, but not since performances in the 70's and perhaps early 80's have I ever entirely enjoyed it as I once did and indeed I stopped trying to see it since I can only go to the ballet occasionally in any case. But this weekend I was in NY for a slew of performances and happy to give it another chance. I liked it, but...and I am still trying to figure out where the "but" comes from. I think the tone very quickly turns too cutesy for me--some of it is performances (I don't remember Verdi being as archly comic as Kowroski as the woman in green), but I think some of it is the choreography. When the music/choreography does seem to go deeper and darker, I did not always feel the dancers got to the same place. I did think the quality of dancing at the performance I saw Saturday night was very fine -- Peck (in pink) is always flawless and dances with subtle musicality and there was one tour jete where, among a group of men, Catazaro (in blue) went lightly soaring with real ballon and I thought--'oh no wonder they are pushing him'--and all the other men as well were very skillful, Tyler Angle especially. Still, with the exception of Mearns the performances mostly remained generic for me and I'm not sure the problem is entirely the dancers. Mearns is another story. In Dances (as in other roles) I found her remarkable in her ability to convey the sense of an entire world within her and around her. (She did slip at one point which broke some of the spell, but then in an instant she restored that spell.) I know Peck can do it--I saw her do it two nights earlier in Emeralds--but somehow even her performance didn't take flight for me. In general, Mearns was the heroine of my visit, dancing at every performance I attended--Thursday, Friday, and Saturday matinee and evening and indeed Sat night dancing in both ballets on the program. I felt lucky because I find her the most compulsively watchable woman in the company and her Diamonds was especially memorable, even thrilling. (I did think her tights looked odd when I looked through opera glasses from the first ring--one could see her ankles; someone told me she sometimes wears stirrup tights. I don't know if there is a physical reason for that--protecting blisters or some such--but it's not a choice I care for aesthetically and certainly not in Diamonds.) She also helped make Union Jack an event for me: forceful and severe as she led her regiment dancing to a pounding section of the music in the opening and adorably silly and energetic in her sailor suit at the end. I hesitate to say I was pleasantly surprised by Spectral Evidence, but I found it disturbing in a way that genuinely affected me. It was decidedly not generic and seemed to draw on a wellspring of imagery that percolates through American fantasies about the Salem trials that were its inspiration--hysteria, child abuse, repression, violent death and almost equally violent rebirth. I found it to be a serious work and very powerfully danced by Robert Fairchild, Peck and the entire cast. I had not really been looking forward to it and ended up very glad I saw it. However the big emotional event for me during my visit to NY was...uh...the Costermonger bit in Union Jack, for it gave me a final chance to see one of my very favorite ballerinas Jenifer Ringer for one final time before she retires. I was so focused on her, so flooded with memories watching her, and so tearful [sic] that I actually missed the donkey poop. That is I knew the donkey was doing something it wasn't supposed to because it was moving and the audience was giggling, but it just passed me by...As for Ringer, she was utterly beautiful and funny/expressive in all of her pantomime/dancing. I found myself thinking what a great Massine ballerina she could have been. And she knows how to wear a costume! I am sorry not to have been living in NY for much of her career--just writing about it makes me emotional. Union Jack itself is well, an oddity of sorts. I had forgotten Kirstein's typically eccentric program note for it. He refers the "tepid euphoria" of bicentennial celebrations to the Watergate scandal and then refers to the" sacerdotal function" of the soldier--completely leaving out the post-Vietnam mood of the 70's which would rather have complicated his latter point while changing one's view of "tepid euphoria." The opening parade seems to me an impressive tribute to the company qua company, and stunning to watch--especially when the regimental leaders have real stage presence (Mearns, Janie Taylor too, on Sat night) but not all of them do and for me it meant something different and more moving when the ballet was first done and, at the end of the first section, Farrell was at the front of the entire company. Likewise the silliness at the end. I love Reichlen and she has the legs for Wrens--but not the oddly witty sexiness and daring elan that enabled Farrell take the silliness to another realm. Final thoughts on my visit? An older gentleman sitting behind me Sat afternoon (subscriber I infer) turned to his wife at the end of Concerto Barocco to comment on how wonderful it was--she concurred--then he paused before summing up: "They should do that one more often!" Truer words never spoken.
  12. They are so wonderful -- even cutesy becomes art! Thank you for posting.
  13. I'm at a pay per second computer at a hotel, but will say briefly that despite some ingenious lifts and partnering, I found it mostly disappointing...not terribly musical, not terribly memorable. (Though Mearns certainly danced beautifully.) Problems aggravated by uber-shadowy lighting and costumes that blended into the shadowy-ness. Scarlett designed the costumes and I assume he wanted the shadow appearance--the ballet's title is Acheron and it concludes with a dark drop falling up stage--but for me it contributed to an amorphous quality that wasn't suggestive, just rather undefined.
  14. Wanted to add postscript to my last post to say of course, I'm very thrilled that (barring unexpected occurences) I will have the chance to see the Bolshoi at all!
  15. I am in NY this weekend for NYCB and went to box office to buy an additional series directly AND ask as innocently as possible about other tickets. The person at the box office was perfectly polite but entirely strict about buying "packages" only. I am pretty frustrated -- but I would be much less so if I could at least believe everyone was being treated the same... I expect Spartacus to sell out or nearly so--for many people it IS the Bolshoi. But though I'm throwing all of my post January Ballet budget at the company (though I plan to skip Spartacus), I could very much wish they had decided to include at least one "riskier" item--Lost Illusions or Esmerelda. With Obraztsova and Hallberg I would even have been thrilled to see Marco Spada. It's especially puzzling since the Bolshoi is surely never a hard sell and in the wake of recent scandals will presumably be less of a hard sell than ever.
  16. Just an extraordinary figure--I remember how thrilling it was to see him, late in his career, in a role created for him by Bejart...
  17. It's not surprising that there's a kind of "bonus" that comes with being on scene, and I wish I were on scene, but one could make a perfectly rational argument that someone coming from out of town should not have things made more difficult or less attractive for them. (Putting aside the ballet-fan context: tourism is a major NY industry...) Anyway, I was not happy that over the phone I was not permitted to make the kind of Bolshoi purchases people describe having made at the box office.
  18. Yes indeed...Marx and Engels were themselves big fans of Balzac, making him completely legit for the Soviets.
  19. Another photo of Kirkland doing the leap--a photo that I love. In younger days, I bought a copy (probably at the Ballet Shop) and had her autograph it, but I don't have an image I can reproduce of that autographed copy: https://www.google.com/search?q=kirkland+as+kitri&tbm=isch&imgil=cRJU6MoTxe0rBM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcTIaKtbskitJp6NkoOh8oyxewO8Z57hWKJTlv4-6UxuYcssHPb8%253B236%253B225%253BduVMiGtEkXbBXM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.pinterest.com%25252Fdomineaux0%25252Fnijinsky-and-friends%25252F&source=iu&usg=__3IMyTweNKV-DzFyXAhaok4mPIZ4%3D&sa=X&ei=sg_oUpa_OJPLsATLlIGgDw&ved=0CC0Q9QEwAw&biw=1213&bih=689#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=cRJU6MoTxe0rBM%253A%3BduVMiGtEkXbBXM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fmedia-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%252F236x%252F84%252F87%252F42%252F848742deb672e763bb0ff6137f994c02.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.pinterest.com%252Fdomineaux0%252Fnijinsky-and-friends%252F%3B236%3B225
  20. In both Chicago and NY in 2012 she did something unusual with the first act hops on pointe--but what she did was different each time (and both times musical, in character, and done with ease)....
  21. "New York" in this case would presumably mean the leadership of ABT which sometimes seemed not quite to know what to do with Messmer--a problem aggravated by the context of their often limited repertory. Which is nuts enough. (Ratmansky did feature her--and brilliantly in Firebird for example.)
  22. There were 5 of us at the Conyers GA theater showing Jewels. I found the camera work for Diamonds --when they cut back and forth between various perspectives--way too busy, very much interfering with my ability to follow the choreography. Like VolcanoHunter I also disliked the magical materialization of the dancers in the empty stage, a "special effect" that completely undermined the live performance aspect -- and, in fact, undermined the choreography since the opening pose of the dancers as the curtain rises is a not trivial part of the latter. Otherwise my only problem with the camera work was briefly in Emeralds and maybe a nano-second in Rubies when the feet of the downstage dancers were cut off. Perhaps too there were times when the camera should have stayed still as the male lead raced by (especially in Rubies), rather than racing along with him--which tends to minimize the impact of the dancer's speed. In fact, I quite enjoyed the broadcast. I liked Stashkevich very much in Emeralds. Maybe not the first few seconds of her solo--which, not coincidentally are the one part of the ballet for which I have very vivid memories of Verdy and which, in Stashkevich's performance seemed a little rushed to me. But otherwise, thought she was wonderful with her very supple back and slightly cool affect. I liked Tikhomirova much less; her facial expression seemed too archly dramatic to me and her dancing just didn't feel strongly articulated. I had a mixed reaction to Rubies. Certainly I was impressed with Shipulina. When she started I thought perhaps she would be too cautious, but as the ballet proceeded she really seemed to dance the steps. I shared Helene's reaction to Krysanova, though I appreciated at least that she didn't want to pretty things up. (Some time ago I watched a few minutes of a tape of the Mariinsky's Novikova in it, and she appeared to be dancing Theme and Variations in a red tunic.) Also, I don't know how Krysanova's performance would have seemed in the theater, but in the HD broadcast her facial expressions seemed over the top to me and made the "Americanness" feel very externally put on. I was impressed by the quality of Lopatin's dancing, but it did sometimes feel too pretty to me. Still overall I enjoyed Rubies too. Diamonds I liked very, very much. Loved Smirnova, though in the later parts of the pas de deux I did see the tendency to turn into "Odette" Helene mentions; for much of it she seemed more a young and slightly mysterious Tsarina to me--and throughout I found her dancing just gorgeous. I thought that Novikova (the Bolshoi's spokesperson Novikova, not the Mariinsky ballerina) made a mistake in her French introduction, referring to Balanchine's three cities as Paris, New York and "Moscou"--in English she said St. Petersburg and I would be curious if anyone heard the French the way I did or if I imagined it. But overall I thought she did a good job. Her questions to Filin seemed more interesting actually than his answers, though I suppose he saw his job primarily as being a booster for his company and dancers. Was happy to see him in any case.
  23. Edited when I realized I had placed my comments in the wrong thread. Moderators feel free to delete.
×
×
  • Create New...