Paul Parish

Tolstoy loved Chekov's story "The Darling."

Did they also list promotions? (I'm just wondering how the marvellous Kobakhidze and Chrysanova are faring inside the company.)

War and Peace is my favorite novel ever. i'd always heard it was so heavy and difficult, and then I couldn't put it down -- I loved these people so, it was a physical feeling, I just loved them -- Natasha, Nikolai, Pierre, Andre, Maria, the old Prince and the old Count Bezukhov, God how I loved him, what a wonderful old man. The scene where he danced the Daniel Cooper with the old lady at Natasha's name-day party had me beside myself with joy; the LOVE in that family! God how I loved them all. Though the last time I re-read it, I got bogged down when the Mason started in on Pierre about his wife. I had seen the BBC tV version before I read it, ALL 26 episodes (they ran on KQED twice a week all summer, and i scheduled the week around them). Let me recommend that series to anyone who's curious but afraid of W+P. Young Anthony Hopkins played Pierre, and he was wonderful. The whole thing was wonderful; I had to read the book after just to get back

Well, I think he has it both ways -- At the very end of the article, he blames Schwarzkopf for marrying a Jew (Walter legge, who anybody who knows anything about their relationship will understand was to her an artistic director, at a smaller level as Balanchine was to Farrell). Whatever Goebbels was to Schwarzkopf, can anybody imagine that she'd want to talk about that? This is prurient interest.

dear ATM and Jane, Thank you thank you thank you. What an interesting career -- and Pas des Deesses, also; another Romantic evocation. Wonder what HE had to go on; pd4 strikes me as a very very nice piece of construction; I like it better, I think, than Lacotte's Sylphide. I suppose it's wholly ersatz? What connections can he have had to the real thing? Russians in London? Karsavina? Legat? Would the tradition have kept some of the combinations alive? Certain passages, esp in Grahn's solo (I THINK it's Grahn's, have to study it), seem really poetic, dancerly and effective and musically apt.... Balanchine and Mason are not particularly helpful on the "reconstruction," though the discussion of the original is detailed and evocative.

Thanks, Mel (though I'm kinda dim on who's Keith Lester; was he in the Ballets Russes?) And thanks, rg for the Ninel info. And good lord, yes, Sizova!!! I hadn't gotten that far yet when I was posting that. Unbelievable jumps, just unbelievable. I guess that is more Gorsky, the Queen of the Dryads does her same combination -- the developpe in ecarte, tombe pas de bourre, grand jete a la seconde, which reverses direction and goes back again (and AGAIN) across the stage -- i've seen those steps a lot, but NEVER like this, not on this scale, nor with this delicacy.... Osipenko's arabesque haunts me.... And Komlova was very lovely in the Sylphides pas de deux -- lovely and compelling. Kolpakova was lovely but not compelling in the Raymonda pas, but maybe it was just the choreography, which I didn't recognize and .... well, maybe on a second viewing something will click there. Serf Nickisch didn't hit me first go-round, but I suspect that it may on second or third viewing.

I'm watching this dvd for the first time -- got it out of the library, and feel I've got to buy it. There are many interesting and curious performances, but two are to my mind out of this world -- Jakobsen's Vienna Waltz to Strauss's Rosenkavalier Waltz), which as choreography is so completely satisfying I'm beside myself with delight, and as a vehicle for Ninel Kurgapkina (whom I'd never seen before but have totally lost my heart to) it is up-so floating fantastic -- and the performance of Pas de Quatre is so exquisitely detailed, again, I'm beside myself. I'm also filled with admiration for Dolin -- it makes me wonder what he had to go on. How much was left of the ballet, aside from the lithograph with hte famous tableau. Right up there also is Osipenko in Jakobsen's Reflections. What a glorious line she had -- and what a fascinating interpreter of the dance. She reminds me of Carolyn Brown, the great interpreter of Merce Cunningham.

"How could they not have known? How could they not have known?" It turns out Gunter Grass was a in the Waffen SS and has only now had felt he had to reveal it. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/17/arts/17g...r=1&oref=slogin I continue to think it is shameful for us to insist that today's standards be applied to people 70 years ago, when the conditions of life were so different it boggles the mind. Not only with respect to what they did then, but how they thought about it afterwards. Many many people who lived through the holocaust -- or indeed World War II -- were unable to bring themselves to talk about what they'd seen, much less what they'd done. My own father, who was a pilot during the War in the US Army Air Corps, had nightmares for the following 50 years every night about his plane going down in flames -- they sat on their gas-tanks, and he heard over his radio the sound of his friends screaming as their planes were hit and burned up alive -- and he only got around to talking about that in the last years of his life. The current fashion to find it impossible to imagine being tainted with sympathy for human weakness ought to be resisted, IMHO, and spoken out against if you have the courage, especially by people who think ofthemselves as progressive. Even the story of her claiming she knew the Second Flower maiden when she didn't -- yet -- and then cramming it and winning the audition -- well, that story makes me admire her pluck and quick wits and gumption and see her as kin to Katharine Hepburn. Jo March would have done that. Heidi would have done that. Harry Potter would have done that. What's wrong with that?

Leonid is right. It is really impossible to judge the actions of people who've lived in repressive regimes if you haven't lived in one yourself. On the other hand, when I was growing up in the south in the 50s I saw my father (a white man) take some very firm stands in favor of hte civil rights movement, and I know the Klan hounded him and my mother, tried to kill him, terrorized her, and saw that destroy my mother's faith in my father's willingness to put her first, which led to the decay of their marriage and my father's nervous breakdown and bankruptcy, so I think I have some idea how these pressures work. True, the seductive quality of Schwarzkopf's work has always made her seem dangerous. She's that kind of artist, like Dietrich. And the incredible depth of her interpretations suggest that she knows too much about pain -- after such knowledge, what forgiveness? And indeed, how can someone have lived through the Nazi era, thrived in the midst of it, without seing things that would leave you much less naive. But I haven't heard anything that makes me think her worse than my own mother.... Are her lies/cover-ups more serious than Rock Hudson's marrying a woman he did not "love" in order to put a heterosexual cover on his career? Nobody on the inside got hurt much by that. (I don't mean that Hudson was an artist of Schwarzkopf's calibre. he wasn't bad in the Sirk movies, but.... Schwarzkopf in her repertoire was the greatest artist of her era.) If you haven't heard her, here's what I'd recommend -- A) with orchestra: Strauss's 4 last songs (any of the versions, collect them all She was very great in Mozart operas, as the Countess in Figaro, as Fiordiligi in "Cosi fan Tutte," (get the version conducted by Karl Bohm, unbelievable), as Donna Elvira in "Don Giovanni" B) with piano: the above-mentioned Wolf album, accompanied by Furtwangler on the piano; unparallelled. She makes those songs (which are really difficult to appreciate) intelligible, as Balanchine made the music of Agon intelligible.

Papeetepatrick, I certainly respect your position. I'm sure you're right about Ms Jowitt. Thank God she's GOT that much clout. I'd have to say though, with respect, that re Segal v Maureen Dowd you're comparing sling-shots and bazookas: Ms Dowd is a political columnist, not a dance critic, and politics at the moment has the arts in a half-Nelson; furthermore, her willingness to speak her mind colorfully is completely supported by the Times -- it's one of their selling points, indeed, to read her column online you have to pay extra.... SO there's not going to be much editorial pressure on her NOT to do such things, even if they WOULD rather she didn't.

I think we're underestimating the problems Lewis Segal faces. He is IMHO a responsible, knowledgeable, fine journalist working for a paper that's on the skids -- as indeed, most newspapers are nowadays. The LA Times is being run from Chicago and the bosses are trying to find ways to increase profit margins, doing that in large part by finding reasons to stop doing the labor-intensive job of reporting the real news and justify the lay-off of squads and squads of their reporters. (The New Yorker reported this months ago.) Note the clause early in the story in which Segal notes that the media aren't covering ballet. He implies that the reasons why coverage is dying are the fault of ballet-programming/marketing (in which there IS some truth), though the larger real reason is that editors are cutting back space for ALL reporting on the high arts, given the polls that show that the demographics their advertisers want to reach don't know much about the high arts (unlike 25 years ago, when people with lots of money to spend WERE interested in the high arts). All over the place real dance critics -- are losing their pulpits and their "livings" -- Mindy Aloff is gone from the Nation, Tobi Tobias from her former job, the Village Voice is threatening to cut back almost everyone except those with "tenure," and arts sections are filling with soft features about gambling online, etc., that anyone with a gift for gab could write. This isn't new, it's just accelerating. Segal can't talk about the cutbacks at the Times which are turning the West coast's greatest paper on the path to becoming a lousy paper like the SF Chronicle -- no editor would let him. So he has to give himself a plausible reason for writing SOMETHING about ballet just to show the flag -- here's a story about the high arts -- and to get it sexy enough to mollify his editors he makes it look like a story about marketing. He has my sympathy. edited to add: I have no "inside" information: as Ia writer myself, I'm aware of these trends, and I'm just registering my speculations knowing hte situation at newspapers in general, and with sadness over hte slide of the great LA Times.

No ballerina records well, alas; at least we have the records of Schwarzkopf, which will last as long as people love music. She is the greatest singer I've ever encountered. I had never heard such intelligence in singing before in my life as I did in her performance -- especially in her passionate, shimmering, profound version of Strauss's "4 Last Songs," which I encountered first in my twenties and listened to nearly every day for a year. I later discovered that her 4 last songs had this place in the lives of many closeted homosexuals, such as I was then, for whom it seemed that finally we'd been understood. She cared so much about the words she sang, you could hear the poetry through the music, the actual value of each word, and she had mastery of emotional coloring like John Gielgud's, it was as if she were just as much talking as singing. Especially the emotions on the scale from weariness to exhilaration -- you could actually hear the smile in the voice on "Sommer laechelt" ("the summer smiles"), and feel her eyes closing as she sang "die mud-gewordnen Augen zu," especially pushing up the scale (like pushing a stalled car uphill) on the repeated phrase "langsam die Augen," then reaching the peak exhausted and coming back down the other side on hte word "zu." Oh what a great poetic artist. There was really no-one like her -- not just a voice or a technique. Her Donna Elvira sounded like she was really out of her mind. (Lotte Lehmann could do that too, but who else?). Mozart and Strauss and Bach, and then the lieder -- not a huge repertoire, if you think of songs as small things -- but it's huge is every song is a whole world in itself, and that's what she did with them. She sang everything as if it were worthy of your complete attention -- hers and yours, so the effect is sometimes as if she's holding up a jewel for you to look into, and making sure that you see every angle. It IS a seductive, calculated way of performing -- you can tell she's manipulating your emotions -- but for me, the test was whether or not there was virtue in the interpretation, and the answer always seemed to be that she was putting herself at the service of hte art, and that the interpretation was incredibly valuable. She overlapped in her repertoire with both Lotte Lehmann and Elisabeth Schumann, both of whom outsang her on certain key songs -- Lehmann was truly heroic (she sang a whole Dichterliebe, which is a man's cycle, as if it didn't matter what sex she happened to belong to, and when she threw herself at the feet of the beloved, it was total; Schwarzkopf put herself up against THAT), and Schumann was by several magnitudes more lovable. Schwarzkopf DID essay some of Ms. Schumann's great songs -- "Wie glaenzt der helle Mond so kalt und fern", by Hugo Wolf, which contains more drama within 2 minutes than all of Pelleas and Melisande in 2 hours, and made a smaller but within its limits still perfect world, with respect for those emotional effects Schumann commanded which she herself could not reach. It's not fashionable right now to give Schwarzkopf her due as an artist -- judged by the product, it WAS an art-for-art's-sake career, and no working critic with a job and a mortgage can afford to countenance that. Tomassini's obit is particularly stingy. Funny, the ballerinas like Kolpakova who were clearly ACTIVE Soviet party bullies get a much freer ride than a young singer who may have joined the Nazi party because it was the only way ahead. She lied about her connections; but look, her party connections only interest us because of the staggering quality of the performances she gave in opera and lieder. If it turns out that she was a major spy, and sold her nearest and dearest into captivity, well maybe so, then I'll change my mind. But it STILL won't vitiate the performances. There IS dark material in Schwarzkopf's psyche, tremendous will and ambition and competitiveness, no doubt -- but any classical art requires those traits (look at Fonteyn). And if it turns out that she belongs in hell, well, still, I won't feel guilty for praying that they offer her a little brandy from time to time. There are times when listening to her sing made me feel less like killing myself, and I owe her a lot.

Chabukiani's is very old-fashioned but great..... there's a film of it I saw 20 years ago at the Pacific Film Archive, very moving....

Thanks for your reports. We're all agog to hear how you like it. Yes Marina Eglevsky, (Andre Eglevsky's daughter) is a widely-respected teacher in the Bay Area; she is I believe her father's heir, and she set this version of the ballet (which Balanchine left to Eglevsky) for SFB. Interestingly, she set Mr B's Sylvia pas de deux (which was also made on her father) on the Bolshoi for their Balanchine centennial celebration. You all might want to think about the relationship of this unfamiliar Harlequinade pdd to the Sylvia one you all know so well. Re Morris's Sylvia, DrB and all of you, you've gotta go back to see Guennadi Nedviguine's Aminta, the purest classical dancing, he looks like Carlo Blasis. Also, you'll recognize the curlicue thing you mention in the finale, as something that's part of Aminta's material from the beginning. It's a renversee, a movement that "pours forth" - -like from the horn of plenty. Aminta ends his first-act turns in attitude, tipping hte attitude forward, in his first entrance, when he's declaring his love for Sylvia, and the renversee in effect shows us his heart is overflowing...... so in the last act, when his gazillion pirouettes end in a renversee and he tips forward and then recovers and leaps around himself -- what IS it he does? that solo should be set for ballet competitions, it's so hard and so exuberant and APPROPRIATE to that moment in the ballet

The only way REALLY to get Ballet Review is to subscribe -- it's distributed so badly, and the web-site is (sigh) a long ways off.... I write for them, and am proud to, and it's a wonderful magazine, but they're not really running a business. On the other hand , that's what makes it so good: it's actually scholarly (and the issues always arrive in the mail just fine). BR is a quarterly, 4 issues for 23 dollars: send a check to 37 West 12th St, # 7J, Ny Ny 10011 or (it says on the inside cover) fax VISA and MC orders to [212] 924-2176.

I love the turned-in thighs, their snaky line, playing against the rotated plane of the shoulders and the snaky line the arms are making, with such sensitive hands.... difficult balance,but no difficulty betrayed. It's also a pose that looks sort of Denishawny, forced-arch,bent-knee arched back pose, except that MR B has made it more extreme by making it a one-foot balance and lifting the working knee to extend the height of hte right angle all the way to hip-height....

i read Ballet Review, DAnce view, Danceviewtimes.com, Ballet/Tanz -- (published in Germany) --which are more for the audience-member, and full of interesting reviews and background material, very well-informed -- and also Pointe (sometimes), and Dancemagazine, which are kinda tilted towards young dancers

Thanks, Estelle -- one wants to get those details right. How fortunate you are to have deep knowledge of the POB -- the men are among the wonders of the world, they have wonderful qualities, including generous attention to the arms. Anthony Dowell gave wonderful attention to his arms -- truly elegant, wonderful finish to his line, and his lines were so true.....

Yes, Estelle, it was Michel Denard.... I don't know why I have such difficulty remembering Legris's name, he is one of the finest dancers I've ever seen -- he has everything technically, and on top of that the intelligence and imagination to understand that the technique is only a pre-requisite. He is such a poet. Hans, I wish I could recall what I've read more accurately (wish I'd been there MYSELF but alas....); it's been a while since I read much about that era. But I DO recall the effect of the accounts (Peter Lieven? one of the French poets? can't remember) that commented on Nijinsky's non-standard port de bras, that his arms were poetically free and floating, often caressing his own face and body -- nothing obscene, but moon-child-y, sensuous, as if half-conscious or lost in some musing.... His sister said that in partnering her he'd throw her up but "you have to come down by yourself" so that she'd use her strength to alight and he could sustain the mood and wouldn't have to look oafish and squat to soften her landing....

Anybody know anything about them? (the Mikhailovsky Ballet) from the press photo, they look Trockadero-esque...... are they remarkable? Paul

well, I'd say that most of nijinsky['s roles are exceptions to this on hte whole accurate rule... There's a portrait of him on exhibit right now i nSF at the Asian Art Museum in "Le Dieu Bleu" with VERY significant Thai arm positions... And Spectre as very elaborate fancifully twining arms, which if you check out hte fabulous performance by hte the Paris Opera ballet, where the man -- oh WHO is it? not Laurent Hilaire, not Mich...absolutely flawless performance, completely changed my idea of how crazy it was reasonable to be about htis ballet... And in Les Sylphides, Nijinsky was famously touching himself all the time...

Def Jef, I think it might do you a lot of good to watch some ballet classes and see how dancers prepare. A lot would be explained rightt here -- other mysteries would arise, but seeing the academy in action would clarify the basics. I doubt very seriously that it would harm your enjoyment of performances.

Back in the late 80s, when Russians started showing up here every year, the critic Keith White used to say you could smell the difference when the Russian ballerinas were in town. The dancers exuded something (he called it musk, but he didn't mean to be taken literally), and the audience's hormonal levels changed acordingly. "They look at us as if to say 'I am magnificent; you may adore me.'" It might be arrogance, but I think of it as a sense of responsibility to the public -- not in a pious way, but as the legacy of Pushkin and Vaganova, the determination to put your will and imagination and soul in service, in order to conquer the heroic difficulties of presenting everything the public needs to see and NOTHING ELSE.

Sidwich, you are right-- When Annette Bening was just graduating from ACT in San Francisco, she played Hermione (the queen) here in Berkeley Shakespeare Festival's production of The Winter's Tale (roughly 1980). I sat in on rehearsals of that and saw one performance, and hers was one of the great Shakespearean performances I've seen in my whole life, on stage or in films. The language in that play is particularly difficult -- the atmosphere is over-wrought, the level of "customary compliment" is high and strained, and once the King's jealousy breaks out everyone is interrupting themselves and each other all the time -- but her understanding of the idiom and the depth of feeling she gave to the role was beyond anything. Everyone was frankly in awe of her talent. There was no aspect of the technique she lacked.

Dear VRS fanatic, I find the Lavrovsky very old-fashioned but nonetheless overwhelmingly powerful and moving and brilliant and wonderful. It is my favorite R&J of them all. In addition to the old production with Ulanova, there is a very impressive performance by Bessmertnova in a Russian video of Grigorovich's (her husband's) production of the Lavrovsky version which I find very moving. In the bedroom scene, Bessmertnova is unbelievable. Turned in of course, like the Bolshoi was, and with hands like tulips (which I've come to love, but it was strange at first) -- but if you can get past that, there's such majesty in her.