Farrell Fan

It's refreshing and unusual, I think, that his loss of ballet virginity came about at a mixed program rather than at Swan Lake. I think more first-timers would enjoy that experience too. But I found the overall tone extremely annoying. Is "the whole edifice" of ballet really founded on "snobbery and daftness"? It's his own preoccupation with fellow audience members that strikes me as snobbish and daft. And that ending about hiring taller dancers...really! I first heard that remark in Italian about 1832, I think it was, after an amazing performance by la Taglioni.

Martins's third of the program last night consisted of three short ballets, performed without intermission. The first of these, Bach Concerto V, seems to me both an unnecessary and unmemorable exercise. But I enjoyed the revivals of Eight Easy Pieces and Eight More. The former was adorably performed by Megan Fairchild, Glenn Keenan, and Lindy Mandradjieff, and the latter very excitingly by Antonio Carmena, Adam Hendrickson, and Daniel Ulbricht. Wendy was originally scheduled to dance with Jock in In the Night. She and James Fayette completely missed the quaity of "lovers' quarrel" which the third couple usually brings to this ballet. I never tire of Symphony in 3 Movements. And I sincerely hope someone IS looking out for the dancers' welfare.

The photos (by Paul Kolnik) are great, but the type is too small and too faint. But it's certainly worth the $5.

The card from NYCB Guild reads: "Join us for this special evening with one of the world's most luminous and legendary ballerinas. Moderator Ellen Sorrin, NYCB's Director of Education, will talk with Ms. Nichols about her memories and thoughts of her great career -- past, present and future." It will be held Monday, January 27, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the New York State Theater. If you're not a member of the Guild, $5 will get you in.

I agree with Michael about Vespro, and thank him for articulating my feelings better than I could.

Leigh's theory of cultural drift is certainly true in the case of jazz, which was about as low as art could get, and is now regarded as high art -- to be passed down with the good china.

Because I have three NYCB subscriptions, there's not only duplication in the ballets I see in any given season, but often triplication. This is the case this season with "Symphony in Three Movements." I saw it last Friday, again last night, and am scheduled to see it again this Friday. To me, the founding choreographers are still the stars at NYCB, and I seldom bother to find out in advance who's going to be dancing their works. This ballet, a great masterpiece from the Stravinsky Festival of 1972, is as thrilling as ever. And I had the added pleasure of seeing two completely different casts: on Friday, Jenny Somogyi and Albert Evans, Abi Stafford and Tom Gold, Pascale van Kipnis and Arch Higgins; last night, Sofiane Sylve and Jared Angle, Janie Taylor and Adam Henrickson, Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto. It was my first look at Sylve, who impressed me as much as she has everyone else. It was great to see Angle in such fine form again. Wendy and Jock were superlative. I didn't think "Le Tombeau de Couperin" came off particularly well. The performance seemed more dutiful than joyous. Peter Martins's "The Infernal Machine" at least has the virtue of brevity. Janie Taylor and Amar Ramasar are also nice to look at. I agree with what's been said about Kyra Nichols in "In G Major;" nevertheless, Friday night's performance seemed distinctly unmagical to me. As for "Vespro," I still find a lot to like in it. There are moments of great beauty to go with the ugly ones. And it has the best soprano saxophone solo since the days of Sidney Bechet.

Back in the fifties, I guess it was, the term "middlebrow" came into vogue as a category separate from "highbrow" and "lowbrow." It proved useful to distinguish, say, the paintings of Andrew Wyeth from those of Rembrandt and ones done on velvet. Similarly, while Beethoven's Ninth was highbrow and "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?" lowbrow, Liberace was aggressively middlebrow. The New York City Ballet was highbrow, burlesque was lowbrow, and the Radio City Music Hall stage show middlebrow. It's a term one doesn't hear anymore, which is both too bad and ironic. Because middlebrow has expanded to the point where it's erased most things highbrow and lowbrow. Just about anything artistic you can name today is, in my opinion, middlebrow -- the ballets of Peter Martins, Riverdance, Ice Dancing, Baz Luhrmann's "La Boheme," "The Lord of the Rings." Even the paintings of Norman Rockwell, regarded as lowbrow in the fifties, are now respectably middlebrow and much sought after. I don't know what to make of it. Do you?

Three performances a year may not qualify as "frequently" -- especially compared to the 30 or more NYCB performances I get to during an average year and the half-dozen or so for ABT. But I wouldn't call it "occasionally" either, since I regularly see all three Paul Taylor programs during their City Center season.

I thought this was an unusually well-written piece, not at all weird, and provided a memorable prose snapshot of both Rafferty and Glover. Dirac was more than fair in pointing out that the first part of the article was basically admiring of its subject, but the article needs to be read in its entirety to appreciate it. It's too bad when magazine articles like the New Yorker Farrell profile and Rafferty's Nation reviews are unavailable online. Fortunately, I subscribe to both publications.

I enjoyed reading the excerpt from Wharton. Thanks for taking the trouble to type it out.

I'm going off-topic to recall my days in book advertising when publishers thought it a selling point to describe what they'd published as "readable." The highest accolade was calling something "compulsively readable." :rolleyes:

Something that's been touched on in this thread hit home today. A friend of mine who's not a ballet fan said he'd read the New Yorker article on Suzanne Farrell and thought it was "wonderful." He said he felt as though he'd learned a lot about Balanchine, ballet, and Suzanne. So while some of us may have been bothered by the recycled material, the much-prized "general reader" was very pleased and impressed. At least in Ken's case.

I've rediscovered this thread (thanks, BW), and was surprised that I hadn't contributed anything. I was a subscriber to Dance View for some time and to Ballet Alert! from its inception. In the latter, Alexandra mentioned the website so I decided to give it a try. I'd come very late to computers and the internet, finally giving in to the entreaties of family and friends who wanted to communicate with me via email. Not till I started reading and posting on this site did I begin to fully accept the internet. It wasn't only that there were a lot of kindred spirits from all over the world -- it was that they wrote in English instead of computerese! Now if only I could remember how I came to subscribe to Dance View in the first place...

It's too bad the poll format is restricted to six choices because Jacques d'Amboise certainly belongs on this list. The true golden age of NYCB coincided with when he and Villella were both at the peak of their art. Fortunately I saw them both many times. I never saw Laing, Eglevsky, or Youskevitch in person. Of the three, I've decided to vote for Eglevsky because nobody's voted for him yet.

The mystique of Mozartiana has been promulgated by Farrell herself. Even the title of her autobiography refers to it. In the book, she writes of having "a dream so vivid that I could not distinguish between sleeping and waking. Although we had not begun the ballet and I had no idea of its format or implications, I dreamed about Mozartiana. I was in a place composed of tall spires. There was sound, not Mozartiana, but a kind of shattering, prophetic, organ-like sound, and I was walking on the vibrating spires upward from one pinacle to another. It wasn't precarious. My footing was very stable; I was holding on to the air." She concludes that chapter with this paragraph: "Balanchine at the age of seventy-seven had given us a vision of heaven as he interpreted it from the Lord's Prayer, 'on earth as it is in heaven,' and it was a very beautiful place indeed, a place past desire, where dancers perform for the glory of God. My dream of climbing spires was answered -- Mozartiana was the light. It was because this ballet existed that I could survive the death of the man who made it."

I wish I'd seen that "Fancy Free" cast too, Giannina, but I didn't. And the NY Sun critic, who chose it as one of the year's best performances, wasn't specific. All she said in explaining her choice was "Talk about an all-star team. This trio had a boyish and buoyant camaraderie on stage. Each was perfectly selected for his solo, and the execution was flawless. Their treatment of this 1944 Robbins work was a triumph." That leaves us more than a little frustrated as to who danced what. Maybe another Ballet Alerter saw it?

I've been trying to keep a low profile on this thread, but I feel it necessary to say that Suzanne has never been "standoffish." Despite her onstage daring, she used to be extremely shy, and some misinterpreted her behavior for aloofness. She is stilll shy, but not as badly. I had the same thought as dirac -- the last time the New Yorker did a piece about her, NYCB fired her. That can't happen this time. I also agree that one shouldn't use Farrell to beat Martins with. She's way above that.

You're welcome, atm711. I'll be at that showing myself. Maybe we'll loiter around the last row when it's over and meet that way.

This newspaper, the first to carry the thrilling news of Peter Martins' elevation to Living Landmark status, today has the year's best picks of its critic, Pia Catton Nordlinger. Choreography -- David Parsons, "My Sweet Land." which Nordlinger declares "the best piece of the year." Her other choices, she says, are "in no particular order." Peter Martins, "Hellelujah Junction." (I note that I liked this piece very much myself.) Twyla Tharp, "Movin' Out." Helgi Tomasson, "Chi-Lin." Dance Performances -- Julie Kent and Angel Corella in ABT's "The Merry Widow." Renee Robinson in Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's "Sweet Bitter Love." Jose Manuel Carreno, Angel Corella, and Ethan Stiefel in ABT's "Fancy Free." Lorena Feijoo in San Francisco Ballet's "Damned" Kirov Ballet corps de ballet in "La Bayadere." Amanda McKerrow and Vladimir Malakhov in ABT's "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux."

I particularly like Acocella's closing sentences: "Perhaps what we are seeing in the Farrell Ballet is an avatar of the early Balanchine, young and crazy. Maybe it has to be this way every time."

The January 6 New Yorker has an epiphany indeed -- an article by Joan Acocella titled "Second Act -- Suzanne Farrell returns with a company of her own." There is a photo of the young Suzanne in "Don Quixote" which has had me palpitating since I opened the magazine. Inevitably, much of the piece is about Balanchine. Acocella reveals that in 2005 Suzanne "hopes to stage the three-act Don Quixote. She also posits an interesting distinction between Balanchine and Peter Martins: "Where Balanchine was an idealist, a mystic of sorts, Martins was skeptical, ironical, up-to-date." She has a moving few paragraphs on the transformation of Peter Boal when he danced "Apollo" for Farrell. Not least, Acocella quotes Alexandra about the Farrell Company. All in all, I haven't been as excited about a New Yorker piece in a very long time.

With all the barbs and brickbats hurled at NYCB's Diamond Project this past year, I found it interesting (and somewhat gratifying) that in the NY Times, Jack Anderson chose it as one of the year's top 10 Moments. "It has produced duds in some of the new ballets it has commissioned over the years. Fortunately, other creations have made the project shine. This spring's gems included Christopher Wheeldon's ingeniously patterned 'Morphoses' and Stephen Baynes's meditative 'Twilight Courante.'" In addition, Anna Kisselgoff, in choosing NYCB as one of her 10 Moments, said "'Morphoses' and Mauro Bigonzetti's clever and fragmented 'Vespro' were highlights of the company's Diamond Project in the spring.'" My own opinion is that however disappointing a few ballets are, there's a welcome air of excitement and expectation during Diamond Project seasons, and the overall batting average is not bad at all.

In addition to all the choices already made, I'd bring back Danilova, Karinska, and Robert Irving.

The best way is through www.filmlinc.com There's a $1 service charge.