Jane Simpson

Thanks, Jude - I'd guess we'll get the same cast tomorrow night, too. Cervera is the one who always catching my eye - he's so musical!

Jude, I haven't seen any of the Giselles yet (I'm going to Cojocaru/Kobborg on Wednesday), but what I'd really like to know is who you saw in the Peasant pas de six? So far I've only seen Jamie Tapper's name.

...and a new piece for the Royal Ballet in May.

I was at the Opera Bastille for the first time two weeks ago - I booked on the Internet and we had seats in the centre of row 6 of the stalls - a wonderful view of the huge stage. I'm told, though, that the front 4 rows aren't raked so you might not be able to see if someone tall was sitting in front of you.

As so often happens, I seem to be trailing around in Helena's footsteps! The school I went to did school operas (often cut down versions) instead of school plays, and so the first one I ever saw was Hansel and Gretel - and I too was a dancing angel ( and a village child, also a dancing role); and the first 'real' opera I ever saw was Gounod's Faust - though in my case I quite enjoyed it. And then Peter Grimes, which indirectly changed the course of my whole life.

I've often wondered why NYCB didn't make Patricia McBride change her name to avoid confusion with Pat - I wonder if they'd accept a Suzie Farrell or a Pete Martins these days? (What was the first PMcB like, by the way?)

Lolly, is it the amount of new work you don't like, or the number of triple bills? If it's the first, I'm not sure I agree with you, and if it's the second I definitely don't! The RB's season has been running three months and I've only seen two ballets, and I'm longing for something different. The four triple bills you mention are all we're getting all season, so far as we know - the de Valois programme announced for the summer has been cancelled - and for my taste that's not nearly enough, particularly as several of the works are being featured in more than one of the programmes. I don't think it's possible, or fair, to judge a new director on his first season; but if next season also is so heavily slanted to full length works I shall be both disappointed and concerned. Fortunately, in a recent interview Ross Stretton said that he plans to split the repertory equally between classics/heritage, existing 'world' choreography, and new works, and I don't see how he can do that without including a lot more programmes of short works in the future.

Doesn't Balanchine himself pronounce it both ways in the 2-part television programme about him? I've always seen that as licence to use either.

Another Shostakovitch!

Another Shostakovitch!

Wayne Sleep was 5' 2", which must surely be the lowest limit - and then only for someone altogether exceptional. However the appearance of the extremely tiny Alina Cojocaru must be raising the career hopes of a lot of our shorter men!

Thankyou for that, rg - in the end, though both sounded interesting, I didn't buy either of them, as the postage etc were adding up to quite a bit although the intial price was only about $10. (They were on e-bay and nobody bid at all)

I've just seen for sale a video called Fuete, with Maximova and Vassiliev - I know no Russian and can't guess from the photograph what this might be. Can someone enlighten me? Also, is the Swan Lake with Johnny Markovsky worth having?

Thankyou for the information about the Martins ballets, Alexandra - and I'm thrilled to see Kate Johnson is in there too - she was in the Paul Taylor company when I first fell in love with them.

A British TV channel (not one that I can get) is showing this week a programme called 'Ballerinas' - 5 pieces by Peter Martins, with Farrell, McBride, Watts and Nichols. Does anyone know what the ballets are? And is it a commercially available video?

I think it's very intriguing that de Valois' telegram to Fonteyn when she first danced Giselle at the age of 17 read 'And some have greatness thrust upon them'. You can read a lot into that! I also like Fontyen's own letter to a friend when she heard that Markova was leaving the company: "I cannot think what will happen.. without her; we shall all have to work very hard, but even hard work won't make a Prima Ballerina if there isn't one". I don't think, from what one reads about her at that age (16), that she was being disingenuous. (Helena, have you got a lovely book called Talking of Ballet, by Jasper Howlett (a pseudomyn, I believe)? It's a fan's view of the early Vic Wells seasons and he/she certainly picked out Fonteyn at an early stage.)

There's an extremely relevant article in the current ballet.co magazine, in which David Bintley talks to Brendan McCarthy about his Catholicism and its influence on his work. It's at http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_01/de...iew_bintley.htm

Surely Tatiana is the older sister? It is stated quite clearly, several times, in the Pushkin original, and watching previous performances it has never crossed my mind that this was not the case - in fact surely it's part of the point.

It's His Master's Voice - the little dog listening to the gramophone was their trademark.

Robert Helpmann certainly did do Carabosse - in the famous RB Messel production in the 1940s he used to double it with Prince Florimund.

Although I don't hold any particular brief for Ross Stretton, I do think he's getting a lot of flak at the moment for things that aren't his fault. Carlos Acosta only actually joined the Royal Ballet for one season and has been a guest artist since then - if anyone failed to hang on to him, it was Anthony Dowell. He's scheduled to dance both Don Quixote and La Bayadere with the company this season. Mukhamedov has also been a guest artist rather than a member of the company for the last 2 or 3 years, and though Stretton's way of telling him he wasn't being used in future seems to have been extremely tactless, there's no reason to believe that Dowell would have kept him on either. Mukhamedov's technical capability has been fading distressingly for several seasons and as he won't consider any but leading roles, this had to happen either now or very soon. Sarah Wildor is another matter entirely, I agree.

How tantalising - I get the home page with no problem, but whatever I click on from there, I get a message saying 'Configuring grafics to browser size' and then it goes into a loop. I use Netscape - is anyone else getting this problem?

And in London we're anxiously waiting to know if the Alvin Ailey company will make it here for their scheduled opening on Monday night. And 2 minutes later, I've just heard that they're not coming. [ 09-14-2001: Message edited by: Jane Simpson ]

I wouldn't go as far as 'grinning mugs', but I definitely found the word 'cheerleaders' going through my mind as I watched. Maybe they were just on a collective high for some reason. I don't think it was where I was sitting - roughly the same distance from the stage as I've been before. The thing that was different, though, was that I was sitting at the far right hand side of the theatre (cheap seats) and I won't do that again for this ballet. When the curtain goes up on the famous diagonal, you see a line of dancers at right angles to your line of vision, looking straight at you - your brain knows it's a diagonal really, but you get nothing like the same impact. (Maybe that's another thread for sometime - which ballets look best from which side?)

Watching Symphony in 3 Movements during SFB's London season, I was astonished by their interpretation of the first movement. When I've seen it before (NYCB, Birmingham RB) it's been tense, aggressive, even menacing - but SFB does it far more cheerfully. Lots of smiles from the corps and soloists, a general air of college kids playing around. I looked it up in Repertory in Review and it sounds from that as if it was done unsmilingly in the early performances. How do other companies do it? Has NYCB's version always been edgy? (I'm not criticising SFB, as it worked quite well done this way, I was just rather taken aback!)