tempusfugit

Paquita, that's the Dance of the Blessed Spirits (the D minor section-- I only heard this on the clip. the Minuet is in F, the relative major key) from Gluck's Orfeo . it is indeed not only an opera (in its original incarnation) but more than one ballet. You are probably thinking of something from "Chaconne", Balanchine's ballet for Farrell and Martins from 1976, which was featured in "Elusive Muse" and is still in the NYCB repertory today...

M. Witchel and Fellow Scholars: Having been reminded of the Ravel Festival by M. Witchel's erudite post, I was diverted to find among my programs a worthy companion in the Super Size Ballet category: GAS PAINS IN THE NIGHT (consisting of Undone, Le Giblets, and CARBO) As one might imagine, this somewhat unbalanced three-course meal is most out of fashion these days, consisting as it does of raw meat, gravy, and Wonder Bread with sides of buttermilk biscuits and Parker House rolls. The New York Times observed, however, that "here is a ballet the dancers can really sink their teeth into...."

Old Fashioned, I saw the Saturday night performance. Julie Gumbinner did indeed get engaged that day, to Lucas Priolo, who danced the Prince opposite her that night. it was rather fun: at the end of the curtain calls, after the conductor had come out and bowed, a ring was brought out on a cushion and Priolo knelt and put it on Gumbinner's finger. She looked delighted and actually surprised. The performance was generally good-- I think Barbara Bears deserved top honors as the Fairy Godmother. She is back after a two-year retirement/maternity leave, so I understand, and has never looked better.

Bobbi, if you remember Elizabeth Loscavio ( :green: what a loss), I saw her dance Ballo once and the "Merrill special", the jete cambre ( I THINK that's the term...), was BEAUTIFUL, although not as high and dazzling as Ashley's. So it has been seen again, though not recently. I too had only seen Feijoo in less demanding parts and am delighted that she's so brilliant. Mary Carmen Catoya of Miami City Ballet is another ballerina whom I thought of as lyrical ("Emeralds", "Giselle", etc) who surprised me in Ballo. great fast feet! OK. The board agrees. When do we get Bouder in this role? It's almost, lol, made for her.....

Yes, and I wish I'd seen that! heard it was great, and in fact Follies is my other favorite Sondheim show. Roundabout was excellent the time I saw a production-- I also remember BD Wong from M. Butterfly, and John Lithgow..... Did you ever see Postcards from the Edge? Shirley MacLaine does a wonderful I'm Still Here in that.

Brady is highly intelligent and an excellent writer (she apparently has published a couple of novels now, out of print, of course) ; some of her observations about classes, schools, etc (Madame, the pianist, and pianists in general; the general desire to appear stupid; the lovely description of the young Patricia McBride) are acute. Although she certainly must take responsibility for her life , I would point out that she DID have the Mother From Hell (worse than Allegra Kent, which is saying something) and was obviously affected by this, just as bad upbringings affected Kent, Kirkland, and probably many other dancers.

and, by the way, Harriet Hilliard had a lovely presence and a nice voice. She sings one of the prettiest songs in all of Fred&Gingerdom. Carefree is wonderful-- the golf number!!! it's true that Cyd Charisse, one of the great beauties of all time (the legs that ate Europe, at least.....) , was a ballet dancer and stronger technically than Ginger Rogers. however, Rogers's panache, her divine figure, her ability not to look disgraceful next to Astaire---- Let's Face the Music and Dance may be my favorite, although Never Gonna Dance is great too. Swing Time's score is superb, and Roberta features one of the two or three greatest ballads of all time, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Silvy, speaking of They Don't Write Em Like That Any More, the orchestras in these movies, and the playing, are beyond belief. They are sublime and you will never hear string playing like this again, ever. it was permanently destroyed fifty years ago or so. Worth watching just to listen.

thank you, Mr. Waffle, except that I would say the ubiquitous and FREQUENTLY execrable Harold Bloom....... :green: as much classical literature as you can read, including all the works mentioned already (the Iliad, the Aeneid, Thucydides, and various Romans as well) Chaucer: Canterbury Tales Dante: The Divine Comedy (there are now some good translations, including side-by-side) Melville: Moby-Dick Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment Flaubert: Madame Bovary Tolstoy: Anna Karenina Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James (Henry): The Portrait of a Lady Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop Wharton: The House of Mirth

Glebb, you really should go, especially if you haven't seen the show before. it's terrific-- one of Sondheim's best efforts ( I think this and Night Music are his best musicals)..... a hilarious patter song a la G and S for four ambassadors, I believe it is, a beautiful trio for three sailors, and all sorts of amazing effects--

Brioche, that's sad. I remember Loscavio at SF Ballet, and what a goddess she was. Never did understand her departure. she has been and will be sorely missed.

Jeff Edwards-- a true prince-- Mimi Paul was ravishing, Marga. Balanchine DID make her a principal and DID choreograph three, I believe (Don Q variation, Valse-Fantaisie, and Emeralds-- anything else?), roles on her, and she did dance diva ballerina roles like Symphony in C adagio. But I agree. a sad waste. Bart Cook, for sure, and Calegari. I doubt the truth of those departures will ever be widely publicized. :green: I have never understood why Meunier isn't universally acclaimed, either. and Samantha Allen. in that awful Martins Swan Lake, her variation in the pas de quatre was quicksilver, lissome, mercurial.....should have been so much more of that dancer.

yes. Mandradjieff. tremendous talent.......... Glenn Keenan, too. could we PLEASE see her in a principal part? Evans of course. Korbes would make a lovely Lilac, not to mention many other roles she would dazzle in.

gosh, only a few hours and two people already beat me to saying ELIZABETH WALKER Wish I could have seen her "Man I Love". Why is this woman in the corps? huge ditto on Korbes, who ought to be seen in all sorts of beautiful roles, and Rutherford, although at least she was given Emeralds this season........

Silvy, although there are certainly other criteria for "major" status (ugh, what an adjective, sounds like baseball-- major and minor leagues.....), the test of time is one way of determining this. Both Sylphide and Fille have lasted quite a while, and outlasted most of the ballets they grew up with. There is also some divine choreography in the Ashton in particular (the ribbon pas de deux, etc). If you consider it further, it's hard to think of any ballet which more than La Sylphide epitomizes the demand for weightless, ethereal dancing-- a touchstone of ballet for many years.

Ulanova in anything, but especially Giselle Tallchief in the 1949 premiere of Firebird Nerina doing 32 entrechats-six in Swan Lake by way of a reply to Nureyev, was it? The 1956 premiere of Divertimento no. 15 with Adams, Hayden, Kent, LeClercq, and Wilde Giannina's production (but live) of Beauty with Soloviev and Sizova one of the Royal's Beauties from the early sixties with Fonteyn and a galaxy of supporting ballerinas such as Seymour, Parkinson, Mason, etc. (this occurred...) Verdy and Villella in La Source and of course Verdy in Tchaik pas, Emeralds, Liebeslieder, etc McBride and Villella in the premiere of Tarantella LeClercq in anything at all that she ever danced Plisetskaya as Kitri

The first thing I saw McBride in was Baiser-- to echo Oberon-- . I have wished ever since that I had been older (although I went to a performing arts school and knew a tiny bit about ballet at the time, such a performance as hers can't be grasped by an adolescent) but I have also remembered, forever, the indelible impact of her dancing and personality. I never saw anyone else like her, and when I recall the end of her variation (a triple pirouette on the diagonal, two on point, one off-- talk about TROUBLE....) I still have a frisson. Even Helgi Tomasson, an icon of grace, strength, and refinement, could not take my attention from her. Later I saw her in many of her created roles, and especially remember the Intermezzo and the curved lines she made in it; I've never seen those lines recreated by another ballerina, though many wonderful dancers have done the part. She once said in an interview that she had a "special arc" for Brahms, meaning the line of her back and the epaulement, I assume, and it isn't surprising. I had the pleasure of taking a friend to Jewels once-- with McBride at forty AFTER maternity leave dancing Rubies-- I said nothing about her age, of course, and after the performance (which had included Nichols and Farrell.....) all he could say was WHO IS THAT BALLERINA???? I said, yes, she's great, isn't she. How old do you think she is? he said, oh, twenty-eight, thirty? I said, well, actually, forty, with a child. I'll never forget his face!

As the tenor of this thread is violently anti-Iannone, I doubt this will be a popular opinion-- but I think she's essentially right, as Croce was right long ago, about the decline of the company under Martins. Yes, Drew is completely correct that she shouldn't pontificate about NYCB's demise after seeing two evenings of Balanchine there this season, and Juliet is right that such assertions may be dismissed summarily since Iannone doesn't provide background. I myself wish she hadn't stuck in that silly comment about "Oedipal revenge". :green: I think there may be several reasons for the lack of background: the fact that it was not a critical essay (without limitations on space); the fact that these criticisms have indeed been leveled at Martins for nearly twenty years and are anything but new (Iannone may have felt that the context was obvious without explanation); perhaps the fact that some of her arguments are not at all debatable (the company IS dropping steps and leaving things out, in ballets from Barocco to Square Dance, and I'll let BA readers draw their own conclusions about that fact and Martins' ballerina of choice in both roles of late....). If one reads the interview with Martins from the Washington Post (which Alexandra kindly put in the Links of Feb. 29 his own responses to questions condemn him... "We still have over 85 percent attendance-- how do you account for that?" "Life goes on.... I'm happy she is busy.... It's not just Suzanne, there are millions of them out there." "Imagine if some ballet company out there asked me to coach 'Violin Concerto,' because I was in the original," he continued. "How preposterous. "What, I'm going to go to Russia and spend three weeks coaching 'Violin Concerto,' just because I was one of the originals? There are people who can do that just as well as I. And I'm busy." Res ipsa loquitur.

Yes..... or maybe she doesn't like this particular choreography? it's been several years since I saw the NYCB Beauty and I don't remember exactly what he has Florine doing.

I think Florine, or Bluebird Princess as she is sometimes called, is a ballerina role. it's often been alternated with Aurora (Sibley, Park, Jenner, Benjamin, Tapper I think, to name a few Royal ballerinas who have done both regularly) in almost the same way that Dewdrop and Sugar Plum are often done at NYCB. Florine is certainly demanding enough technically. Perhaps that reviewer isn't aware of the history of the role?

Alexandra, Richard Buckle reviews performances of Beauty with the Royal (in the sixties, I believe) with a lineup of fairies: Seymour, Collier, Vere, Parkinson, Jenner, and Mason, with Bergsma as Lilac and Fonteyn or Sibley as Aurora!!! Those were the days, huh? I've always thought as well that Beauty was a benchmark ballet-- a touchstone of beautiful classical style, brilliance, and lavish elegance. The descriptions of Diaghilev's Beauty.... and, of course, what was the Royal's first overwhelming smash hit in America in 1949?

Yes, dirac, I remember that Farrell quote as well, and also some of Garis' observations about Stravinsky scores and Balanchine, which were interesting. I was, however, thinking of the Weslow interview. :-) I've been a fanatical admirer of Balanchine for many years, since my first sight of Serenade (the first ballet of his I saw), and my admiration for his genius is in no way blemished by my awareness that there are many plausible reasons for his later revisions of some of his masterpieces-- not all of those reasons flattering.

Simon-- I'm afraid we do disagree utterly. I think the "peacock", or "sunburst", image, is obviously a matter of individual interpretation (each viewer WILL see it differently and Balanchine certainly did not, a la Tudor, for example, make a habit of telling his audiences what to see in his images), and I also think that there is no esthetic difference in your characterization of the mime/birth scene as "bathetic" and your description of the final image and what it conveys to you. Both are emotional reactions, which is fine in ballet and as it should be (you like one, you dislike the other) However, your positive reaction to one doesn't make that opinion less emotional or more definitive in any way. On the subject of I Remember Balanchine and Apollo stories, by the way, William Weslow says ..."Jacques was unforgettable when he turned and unwound the swaddling cloth and struggled to be born. Balanchine, I'm afraid, cut that out because he didn't want Baryshnikov to do the wild pirouettes at the beginning and create a sensation." Agree completely with Paul on "Balanchine's awful remakes"... Balanchine was ambivalent on the subject of his dancers' virtuosity and the possibility that said virtuosity might somehow eclipse his choreography. Bruhn, Villella, Weslow, Hayden, Walczak, and Kirkland, to name some disparate sources, have all spoken about this in print.

Seems that there's also a third issue-- when the choreographer "shoots a perfectly good ballet in the foot" :green: I agree that Balanchine often did this-- I too prefer (vastly) Ballet Imperial to Tchaik Concerto (how exactly does Hommage a Petipa and the Maryinsky benefit from flimsy chiffon rather than tutus and scenery?), and the big one in this category IMO is Apollo. the appalling mutilation of the birth scene and the final tableau (the peacock is now the final image as done at NYCB, rather than the amazing pose on the steps)-- does anyone feel this helped Apollo? While it's true that Balanchine changed steps constantly for dancers, tinkered often with ballets in many ways, etc, this seems to me different from cutting a score (Apollo) or redoing an entire idea (was there any audience member who LIKED the Firebird where the ballerina did no dancing, circa 1972 or 3 to 1984?????). Violette Verdy did brises or pas de chat in Raymonda Variations rather than the multiple pirouettes; no two versions of the danseur's role in Symphony in C I are the same; the turning combination from Tchaik Pas coda is different with each ballerina. these changes, however, don't alter the entire ballet. any thoughts on this?

Lopez did dance Carabosse, and was quite evil in the part, I thought. haven't seen Nichols in this role but I enjoyed Ashley in it as well. NYCB goes somewhat against many traditions in casting women as Carabosse (rather than men en travesti) but it is, as Farrell Fan says, one way of seeing great ballerinas who no longer dance the leading role. That is a time-honored tradition at Royal and Kirov both-- for example, Pamela May danced many Queen Mothers and so forth and was apparently wonderful, in large part because her presence was still exactly that of a leading ballerina.

Definitely Roma-- a lost treasure it seems... Metamorphoses, which also has a wonderful score; Cotillon; and VALSE-SCHERZO, a marvelous piece of music which was set for Wilde and Eglevsky. {drool}