Kathleen O'Connell

I second Jack Reed's observation that Mozart Dances live is a very different animal than the broadcast, which I have only just now begun to watch on tape. I was lucky enough to catch performances at State Theater both this year and last and was stunned at how reduced the work seems in the broadcast -- more so than Dance in America's video of Four Temperaments or Stravinsky Violin Concerto does, by way of comparison. It's akin to looking at a postcard of a painting you've actually stood in front of: it's a nice enough reminder of what you saw, but has nothing of the impact of the real thing and the colors are all off somehow. If I hadn't seen Mozart Dances in the theatre and had to rely on the broadcast, I just may well have been wondering what all the fuss was about.

Part of the problem, I think, was the camera work. So much of this particular dance's impact arises from the cumulative effect of seeing gestures and phrases echoed between individual dancers and the group across all three of its sections, and the cutaways to the musicians or to isolated parts of the stage undermine that. (In at least one instance I swear the camera seemed to be locked on a corner of stage with not a single dancer in view!) If, as reported, the camera quickly cuts away from Noah Vinson's flying leap to embrace (I think) Charlton Boyd in Twenty-Seven, it must surely undo some of the work's emotional logic: in the second movement of Double, Vinson is never wholly integrated into group. In fact, at one point he appears to dis-integrate the group by his presence: the circling men drop hands -- separate themselves from each other as well as Vinson -- when he moves into their midst. They continue to perform the same steps as they did before, but without being physically connected to each other. So I think it means something that it is Vinson who flys out of the group to embrace the outsider who has just entered the stage alone; to dimish one of the work's most affecting moments to cut to the musicians seems just plain boneheaded.

Something about video seems to have "flattened" the quality of the dancers' movement, too. The beautiful, swirling dervish turns with the slightly out of sync rolls of the head (the dancers appear to spotting on the sky if they are spotting at all) are just mesmerising live, but barely register on tape. Lauren Grant is, what, all of five feet tall but looked positively monumental whirling through them in the theater. Perhaps ballet's heightened line and dimensionality help it translate better to the small screen. (And for whatever reason -- maybe scale, maybe lighting -- the back drops are much more effective in the theater than they are on the screen. The women's costumes for Eleven look much more chic in the theater, too.) The goofy stuff looks goofy live, too, but Morris' goofiness has never troubled me much in any event.

I found much to be delighted by and to enjoy, and found some things utterly fascinating. I was surprised, for instance, when I noticed just how much and how fast the individual dancers were moving in some of the slower passages, because the overall shape that the group was making -- and which was the center of attention -- was evolving at at tempo much more in keeping with the pulse of the music.

I'm glad I have the tape, but I feel privileged to have seen Mozart Dances live.

[sanderO] It reminded me of abstract art ...

Interesting. I don’t think of Morris as a particularly “abstract” choreographer – no more “abstract” than Balanchine, for instance. I find his work to be emotionally legible in the much the same way that Balanchine’s is – there’s no narrative that one can really articulate in words, but there’s definitely a “story.” In contrast, I find Forsythe and Elo, for example, to be very abstract – no stories there at all, really, just states-of-being. (Wheeldon has it both ways in After the Rain.)

I like Morris’ work a lot, and find it plenty formal in its overall structure, but I did find the bodies very difficult to “read” at first since my previous dance watching experience consisted primarily of Balanchine, Robbins, Cunningham, Taylor, and Graham – and to my eyes those choreographers (and ballet in general) deploy the body in very clearly delineated shapes that hew closely to an ideal armature or grid, whether in motion or in stasis. Morris’ dancers’ bodies don’t quite do that – I’m not suggesting that it is actually so, but in motion at least, their placement looks somehow “approximate” – i.e., not working to an ideal plane: they’re not exactly turned out, but they’re not exactly not turned out either. (Interestingly enough, the shapes Morris’ dancers make look much more clearly delineated and carefully placed in still photos than they do live or in video.) It took me a while to get my head wrapped around this.

I find Morris’ choreography for soloists relatively (and I stress relatively) uninteresting. But his work for two or more dancers – now that I find thoroughly engaging and affecting. To me, these larger shapes seem to resonate more and carry more meaning than the solo work does, and his vocabulary for groups seems richer than his vocabulary for soloists.

Personally, I like the goofy stuff too. The second section of Mozart Dances is high on my list of favorite Morris, but my absolute favorite Morris is when the deliriously joyful Hard Nut Snowflakes explode handfuls of glitter skyward as they hurtle full tilt across the stage – it makes me laugh out loud from sheer delight every single time. The mix of bodies and genders in the same tutus-n-snowcone crown costumes is just wonderful – as if Morris decided to take the inverse of Balanchine and put “everybody -- the world” on stage to get sixteen girls ...

Anyway, I'm heading off to see Mozart Dances again tonight and I'm really looking forward to it!

For my money, the only really successful Jane Austen Novel - to - Movie effort was Clueless. Others have been "truer" to dialogue and period detail, but Clueless was somehow truer to the novel's moral center (the novel in this case being Emma). It's an example of "updating" really working for once.

Edited to add this quote from a Barnes and Noble interview with Edward Gorey:

Edward Gorey: There are all sorts of classics I could possibly illustrate if asked, but as I have over the years accumulated too many of my own texts to have any chance of doing drawings for but a few of them, I would only do something by someone else if I was offered an outrageous sum of money, and maybe not then.

barnesandnoble.com: Any classics you would refuse to do?

Edward Gorey: For example, Jane Austen and the Marquis de Sade, although for different reasons.

perhaps Eifman will go where Gorey feared to tread ...

I bet you can't out-vulgar the Ramones.

More the Iggy Pop type of vulgar. He's one of my role models.

Ha! I'll see your Iggy Pop and raise you Rammstein!

I attend at least one music, opera, or dance performance per week in NY, and honestly, full-house standing ovations seem pretty rare here. (Broadway may be different.) Sometimes a contingent of friends, family and associated well-wishers will stand and applaud, but rarely the whole audience. I’ve experienced a handful of occasions when the whole house stood and applauded with enthusiasm – usually these have been farewell performances or something genuinely knock-you-down awe-inspiring. (Then there are those inadvertent SOs where we’re all putting on our coats and packing up to go and the artists just keep coming out and coming out and coming out for the three people who are still clapping...)

What NY audiences will do when moved is clap for a very, very long time. Earlier this year, I attended a concert at which the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard played a piece newly composed for him by Eliot Carter. Carter, who is 98, was in the audience (it was his birthday, too). When Aimard finished playing the piece (which was really wonderful, by the way) he literally jumped off the stage and raced over to Carter’s seat to say thank you and pay his respects. We clapped wildly for what seemed like an hour (as much for Carter as for Aimard, of course). Then Aimard played the piece again (!) and we clapped wildly some more. Aimard did get a standing ovation when he played Messiaen’s Vignt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus – which is very long and very hard -- at Zankel Hall a few years back. He played it beautifully, but I think the SO was as much in recognition of his having gotten through it in one piece as for his playing.

I think Bart may be on to something with his hypothesis that live performances are rarer and more exciting for audiences saturated with less immediate forms of entertainment. A few years ago I was talking with some musicians in a chamber orchestra who had recently returned from a tour through some small rural towns that rarely had the opportunity to hear much live music. They told me that the audiences clapped enthusiastically for everything whenever and wherever they could – including between movements. The musicians (who didn’t mind the between-movements clapping one bit) decided it was a reflection not of the audience’s lack of discrimination, but rather, of their great pleasure at hearing beautiful music played live, right there, just for them.

Anyway, I leap to my feet when moved to do so and stay seated when I’m not. And irrespective of how much I’ve paid for my ticket, I leave at intermission if it stinks. Life is just too short to squander on bad art – no need to compound having wasted one’s money by wasting one’s time.

Oh I will miss them both! Indeed, I’ve already missed Sarah since her departure from NYCB a couple of seasons ago. She was one of the dancers that made corps-watching so rewarding, especially when she began to take on more senior corps roles. She always struck me as being fully engaged with the choreography and with her fellow dancers; her warm, gracious, lively presence added a special luster the ensemble. (I remember some of her ensemble work more vividly than I do some other dancers’ solo efforts!) I’ve enjoyed many of Seth’s performances, but I’ll remember him best as the male lead in Evenfall. I thought that ballet finally came together and lived up to its initial promise when he replaced Woetzel. There could hardly be two more different dancers: Orza has none of Woetzel’s quicksilver élan (few do, of course); he’s more deliberate in his attack (to the point of sometimes seeming willing to wrestle a phrase to the ground by dint sheer brute force if that’s what it’s going take to get to the other side) and more earnest in demeanor. Yet despite these differences – or perhaps because of them – Orza really inhabited the ballet and eliminated a vacuum at its center that Woetzel for whatever reason could not fill. He just looked terrific in it and I’m sorry that I won’t get to see him (and Weese) dance it again.

I wish them both every success!

What about that "Double Feature"...

Yes! I forgot that one, and it is different, if not "startlingly" so.

Hmmm ... I missed this while I was out of town. OK, I'll bite:

Three “startlingly different” full-length ballets? There aren’t that many in the rep to choose from to begin with and I would be hard pressed to find three I could characterize as “startlingly different,” either from each other or from “full length” ballets (whatever that means) in general. Let’s see: Coppelia, Don Q, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Nutcracker, R+J, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake ... that’s about it unless you throw in Harliquinade and Jewels ... Are they counting Nutcracker? Could one of the premieres be another full-lenghth ballet? (But wouldn't that get a special mention?)

“ ... and one unique, celebratory send-off” – any guesses? Hübbe? Kistler? A gang retirement? (The list of dancers who might be toying with the idea of moving on is long and distinguished.)

“ ... two world premiere ballets” – OK, there will be the inevitable Martins effort, but what’s the other? Ratmansky? Evans? (The Nightingale and the Rose was Wheeldon’s last for NYCB, right?)

And "many new theme series" -- Well, I've already proposed "For the Birds" (The Nightingale and the Rose, Firebird, and Balanchine's Swan Lake). How about "Simply Schoenberg!" (Schoenberg Variations, Schoenberg/Wuorinen Variations, and Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet)

An aside: WHO writes their copy? It reads like the mindless brochures for destination wedding venues. "A splendid time filled with dance" -- well, what else would a ballet company's winter season be filled with? "10 diverting programs" -- as opposed to, you know, the bore-you-out-of-your-skull tedious programs that a major performing arts organization might otherwise put on for a paying audience. (Or, is that 10 programs that will divert patrons to the other side of the plaza?) OK - this blurb isn't as bad as the the descriptions of last year's theme programs (the encomium for Episodes read like a sophomore's attempt at Jacques Derrida ...) But still.

I chose no. 5 without a moment's hesitation. I gather I am in the minority in actually preferring block programming to the alternative. Yes, the program titles are lamer than lame. And yes, the company sometimes elects to drop a clunker smack dab in the middle of an otherwise delightful program. But, after 30 years of regular attendance, I can attest to the fact that this has ever been the case and that “non-block” programming is unfortunately not a reliable solution: clunkers wander through the rep like malign planets and one finds oneself trying to dodge several in a single season in an effort to catch a program not marred by their baleful influence. Just when you think you've ducked "Dybbuk," "Irish Fantasy" swims into view.

Here’s what I like about block programming, more or less in order of importance:

1) It presents the company with the opportunity to craft programs designed to amplify the resonances between ballets – resonances of style, of vision, of subject matter. Whether the company elects to make consistent use of that opportunity is another matter, but I believe it will grow more thoughtful and skilled at exploiting these opportunities as it gains experience in building seasons this way.

2) I would be very shocked if it did not make things simpler and more straightforward administratively. A single conductor can be assigned an entire evening, for instance. Life must be less complicated for the musicians, stagehands, costume people, etc. Living life and doing art is hard enough; something that makes it simpler without undermining the truly important things – that may make the truly important things easier to achieve -- is worth embracing.

3) I have limited opportunities to attend performances outside of my regular subscription. As much as I might like to juggle my attendance to catch multiple performances of a favorite ballet while avoiding the ones I hate, it’s just not going to happen. Block programming makes it easier for me to select which programs to see and to see more of what’s on offer during a given season.

4) Once I stopped weeping, wailing, and gnashing my teeth over being forced to endure “Vienna Waltzes” twice in order to catch a second performance “Episodes” and just relaxed about it, I found things to like about “Vienna Waltzes” that I’d missed before, even though I will never rush over to State Theater just to see it again. Sometimes we dislike things for the wrong reasons. (Yeah, I’m probably the only person on the planet who both likes block programming and finds “Vienna Waltzes” a total yawner.)

Thumbs up! (But work on the titles, please ...)

Don't rely on my assessment of Acocella's comments or of the rest of the discussion -- I was put off by much of what was said and was frankly stunned by her exclaiming "Who reads reviews on line!" (I admire her writing) -- but others may respond more favorably. It is a subject on which reasonable people may disagree.

I'm not adept enough to post a link, but you can find the discussion in WNYC's archives for the Leonard Lopate show. Look for the May 8 broadcast.

I can only speak for myself, but I subscribe to two newspapers and a goodly number of magazines. Dinosaur that I am.

Oh, I susbscribe ... but mostly I just end up reading the articles online anyway or printing out what I want to take with me to read on the subway or in the dentist's office or whatever. (Oh, OK, I read People in the dentist's office just like everyone else.) There are a few magazines that are genuinely pleasurable to read in print form, but in many cases I suspect I'll switch over to subscribing to just the digital version at some point and save a few trees. However, since reading the Sunday Times at the breakfast table with my husband is a cherished ritual of many years duration, I'll never give up the hard copy.

Re book reviews: The quality of the reviews New York Times' Sunday book review section is pretty hit-or-miss -- I prefer The New York Review of Books or BookForum or "the back of the book" of the New Republic and the New Yorker. The Times could discontinue book reviewing altogether and I don't think I'd miss it, frankly. Paid book reviewers are essential to have; whether it's essential that they write for newspapers (which is what Acocella et al were asserting) is a different question.

She's dancing in other dancer's shoes for Heaven's Sake.

A little off-toipc -- gleaned from my collection of corps shoes bought on "spec":

Stafford = Ansanelli

Bouder = Sloan

Scheller = Körbes

Have I missed it, or did no one on the board review Wheeldon's new ballet? I would have expected to find reviews here, since it premiered during this time period. If I didn't miss reviews here, how shall I interpret the silence?

-amanda

I liked The Nightingale and the Rose (which I saw at the 6/18/07 matinee performance) much more than I expected to based on the initial print reviews. (None of which I actually read “in print,” of course, and one of which – Mary Cargill’s in Dance View Times – doesn’t appear in print at all.*) Many of Wheedon’s recent works for NYCB (Klavier, After the Rain, An American in Paris, and Carousel) have had the feel of extracts rather than complete, stand-alone ballets, and this one is no exception. It could fit comfortably in, say, a suite of fables with some sort of thematic link. (It will fit very comfortably in the “For the Birds” program along with The Firebird and Balanchine’s Swan Lake. Or, alternatively, in the “Birds and Bees” program with The Firebird and The Cage. Or, if done without program notes, the “What the Heck Was That About?” program with Variations Pour Une Porte and Un Soupir and Central Park in the Dark. ) I liked Sheng’s score well enough, but it’s not the kind of score that makes you sit up and say “Wow, that would be great dance music!” I thought the costumes and staging were very effective, although I could live without the big eye in the moon on the backdrop. (Very distracting – and I kept thinking of The Great Gatsby).

The ballet’s centerpiece is Wheeldon’s very inventive and very effectively macabre staging of the Nightingale’s interaction with the Red Rose Bush, the latter embodied by a male corps led by two soloists (Craig Hall and an unannounced Adrian Danchig-Waring subbing for Seth Orza) in lots of goth hair gel and make-up. (Personally, I liked the hair gel. NYCB male hairstyles are generally discouragingly dowdy, with a couple of notable exceptions.) It's not particularly "dancy" but then neither is the music. And it's very dark and rather bleak. Anyway, I’d like to see it again.

* Recently, I listened to a podcast in which a panel of print media reviewers whined (there is no kinder way to put it) about the ongoing cut back in independent book reviews in newspapers and how this will inevitably lead to the death of American cultural and intellectual life. At one point, Joan Acocella exclaimed “Who reads reviews on line!” apparently under the impression that the sum total of on-line reviewing consists entirely of amateurs posting their musings on blogs. “Dance View Times! Dance View Times!” I shouted, much to the bemusement of the gentleman standing next to me while we waited to cross Broadway.

May 31

Essential Robbins: In G Major, Dances at at Gathering, I'm Old Fashioned

The men's competition was between Millepied and JStafford. I'm not sure who won. Remember when it used to feature Martins vs. Baryshnikov? Martins vs. Tomasson?

It was J. Angle (in purple) rather than J. Stafford (in blue), no? My takeaways: J. Angle can lift anything in his path (at one point I thought he was going to toss Millepied up into the flys, which is one way to win the competition, I suppose) and J. Stafford can catch anything that's thrown at him.

Balanchine’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: When Helena walks weeping across the stage and plucks the leaf Puck holds out to her to dry her tears, while all the little fireflies flutter sorrowfully – and apparently unperceived -- around her. Chokes me up every single time. Even in video. No matter who’s dancing.

Whatever it is that's happening to the ballerina in the "Central Park in the Dark" section of Balanchine's Ivesiana unsettles me far more than The Slap ...

But that "whatever" (and we don't know for certain what it is -- or even whether it's merely in the woman's imagination) is an unusual event in the Balanchine oeuvre. Yes, LaValse is another instance. And a relatively small number of other ballets. The Host never touches the Sleepwalker in LaSonnambula, but his relationship to her (which is never defined) is also unsettling. What troubles me about The Slap, which I argue fits its context in this ballet, is that it seems a culmination of themes that dominate the Martins oeuvre, which I find extremely misogynistic.

I agree that The Slap is not out of context in this R+J, although it's unfortunately one of the most vivid things in it. Although I loathe the production, I appreciate Martins' attempt to avoid putting on a Merchant-Ivoryized Renaissance Disneyland version. I, at least, tend to get so besotted with the prettiness of that sort of thing that I lose the thread of how awful the characters' predicament really is. The Slap is a reminder that Juliet is really, truly at the limit of what a young heart should have to bear.

I'm no great fan of Martins' choreography, but I can't agree that his work is misogynistic, Carbro.

Much of his choreography deals with problematic and disappointing romantic relationships, and because he is coming from a male point of view, his frustration is expressed as frustration with women. But that's no more misogynistic than "Sex and the City." the same frustration expressed from a woman's point of view, is anti-male.

I was thinking about this last night: I’m not sure I’d call Martins misogynistic – I don’t think he actively hates women (or at least that he doesn’t demonstrate this through his ballets). I think women are simply opaque to him in a way that they weren’t for Balanchine (and aren’t for Wheeldon). Even the anonymous ballerinas in Balanchine’s leotard ballets have an imagined inner life that is evidenced through the choreography. (The possible exception is La Porte in Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir, who is after all, a door.) Melissa Hayden’s quip that the first movement ballerina in Symphony in C is “the hostess with the mostest” resonates because you know exactly what kind of party she’d throw, even if a ballerina of only modest gifts dances the role. One can imagine the conversation that the ballerinas in Divertimento No. 15 might have around the dinner table, or the one that those in Agon, Episodes, and Four Temperaments might have. (I’ll go out on a limb and say that I think that when Balanchine puts two women in a ballet it’s so the prima will have someone to talk to: the second violin ballerina in Concerto Barocco comes back at the end of the second movement so that the first violin ballerina can tell someone just how terrific she feels. In Balanchine, sisterhood is powerful.) I think this is why the unsettling women in Balanchine’s ballets – and I ‘d add the Siren in Prodigal Son and the Coquette in La Sonnambula to the list – are so unsettling: their inner experience (a degraded one in the case of these two) is objectified, which is quite a different thing from being turned into an object. (It’s worth noting that these two don’t have any “sisters,” either. Despite being surrounded by an army of revelers, the Siren is the most alone person on the planet, even – especially – when she’s wrapped around the Son.) And isn’t it the very opaqueness and “objectness” of La Porte – as exemplified by the literalness of her response to the music, her total lack of agency -- that makes Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir the oddball in the Balanchine rep that it is?

But the women in Martins’ ballets are objects in the worst way: there’s nothing going on in there. This isn’t hating women, this is being oblivious to them. Martins has to resort to blatant sentimentality (Songs of the Auvergne, Todo Buenos Aires – the version for Bocca) or blunt gesture (Them Twos or R+J – think of Juliet’s Nurse) to impart even a whiff of personhood to the women in his ballets. When Martins adds another woman (or two or three) to the ballet, it means nothing. (When he adds another man, as in Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, I think it means trouble.) I’ve spent years trying to sort out what’s up with the twinned couples that appear so frequently in Martins’ ballets (Fearful Symmetries, The Red Violin) and just draw a blank.

This may be Martins’ point, of course, and I may simply be missing it big-time. But I think the blankness arises at least in part from certain characteristics of his style of step-spinning that constrain the expressiveness of the materials in his hands (I don’t really have the resources to talk about this intelligently, so bear with me). His combinations persistently run counter to (as opposed to actively subverting) the basic up-and-out / torsion away from the center thrust that I see at the heart of ballet’s vocabulary and the expressiveness of that vocabulary. His dancers move their limbs across their bodies, not out from their centers. They make shapes that don’t really develop along a trajectory and resolve. (Eventually the arms get flung up and there’s a lunge out over one leg so the other one looks as if its been extended. Or there’s a sauté arabesque. Or a woman gets picked up and she manipulates her legs for a while. When she gets put down, she crosses on leg over the other, pops one foot onto pointe, and twists like a wire baggie tie.) They look always to be en face, even when moving on the diagonal: they are flattened against a plane rather than fully occupying the space around them. There’s no intra- or inter-phrase change in the texture of the dancers’ movement. Steps and shapes are repeated (and repeated and repeated) without variation or the kind of change of context that might give the repetition some particular expressive resonance or coloring. Everybody gets pretty much the same steps to do in the same way and the steps look hard, but to no particular end. (I remember that the choreography for the male demi-soloists in Octet looked particularly punishing, but even though I’ve seen the ballet four times, I can’t remember anything else about it.) There's tricky paternering for the sake of tricky partnering -- not to crystallize something about the interaction of two people. There’s nothing about the particulars of the choreography that develops the ballet’s narrative arc. I only saw R+J once, and in fairness it may take a viewing or two to do it justice, but honestly, it looked as if Juliet was doing the same steps over and over from beginning to end – you’d think something would change along the way.

OK – lunchtime is over, back to the grind, mid-thought or no ... I think I drifted from saying that women were opaque to Martins to saying that even if they weren’t he doesn’t have the choreographic chops to tell us about it.

The subject of the changing treatment of women in ballet is a legitimate one, but surely the oeuvre of Peter Martins is not the only place to look ("Shambards" comes to mind as just one example).

Whatever it is that's happening to the ballerina in the "Central Park in the Dark" section of Balanchine's Ivesiana unsettles me far more than The Slap ...

To me, the most glaring omission is Abi Stafford. She has made the greatest strides over the past few years, going from a pure technician to adding presence and joy to her dancing to create more fully realized performances. And, she has been back to performing meaty principal roles for several seasons now. They may have pushed her too fast into the Soloist rank, but now I think they're keeping her back too long as a Soloist. I think her brother still has a long way to go (way too academic in his approach, for me. no presence).

Ah, but not when he dances with somebody! I always find J. Stafford’s performances as a partner exemplary – not just in the sense that he supports his ballerina or shows her off to best advantage – but more importantly, in realizing the theatrical possibilities of two people dancing together, even if they happen to be in the back row of the corps. I admit, an eyebrow shot up when I saw him cast opposite Sylve in Firebird – her monumental presence sometimes overwhelms that of even the most vivid dancers, and I’d be inclined to characterize Stafford as “elegant” rather than “vivid” – but he turned out to be the best Prince Ivan I’d seen in a decade. His interactions with the Firebird were by turns wondering, predatory, playful, respectful – and, most importantly, utterly different from his response to the Princess. His presentation of himself really is more effaced in his solos than when he’s dancing with someone, which is somewhat paradoxical, I suppose. (Re his performance as Paris in R+J: never has anyone in lavender tights managed to look so Establishment. I have no idea if that was the intended effect or not, but I liked it anyway. It doesn't say much for the production that he actually lucked out by getting the lavender tights instead of the yellow or turquise ones. And why oh why did Juliet have to spend three quarters of the ballet running around in her slip when everyone else was fully dressed? You know, I've had that nightmare, and it wasn't any fun. )

And I agree – Abi Stafford has indeed blossomed over the past year or so – I thought she looked great in Russian Seasons and just terrific in Symphony in Three Movements. I’m sure her turn will come.

Anyway, congratulations to all, and ditto-ditto-ditto the cheers for Hall’s long overdue promotion.

Well that brings up another point - I don't think NYCB has had a debut in the lead role of Apollo since Igor Zelensky right before he left. And that was only a company debut. He had done the role since he was 19 at the Kirov. There's a whole generation who haven't had a chance at these roles (including Prodigal Son). Why can't Phillip Neal do Apollo (w/Maria Kowroski)? Because he's not blond? He performed the role beautifully and movingly with Suzanne Farrell Ballet. I would have thought Millepied would have been a no-brainer in Prodigal. Hasn't happened. They might get them yet, but it would have been nice to learn it and do it with Boal, Hubbe etc...around to guide them.

Sometimes it does seem that NYCB approaches casting as if its dancers were civil servants: once they’ve reached a certain grade level, they cannot be displaced. I suppose it is time for a few new Apollos (and Terpsichores for that matter) -- but I'm very glad I'm going to see Hübbe in the role one more time before he leaves!

Just as I was just getting ready to write a post on how much new music is on offer in NYC if you know where to look, Alex Ross saved the day with his latest New Yorker piece, which covers the subject much more knowledgeably than I ever could:

The New Yorker: Club Acts

Be sure to check out the on-line, link-loaded addendum on who to hear where:

The New Yorker: Sites and Sounds

I think the internet really has made it much more straightforward to hear new music and engage with the community of individuals who are composing it, performing it, listenting to it, and thinking about it than it was even just a decade ago.

Also, although WNYC isn't a full-time classical music station, it does play a fair amount of new or newish music during its evening classical music broadcasts, and of course, provides a home for John Schaefer and his shows Soundcheck and New Sounds - the latter of which focuses on new music by definition. Every episode of New Sounds can be downloaded in its entirety at WNYC.org in case you're in bed or, alternatively, still out on the town at 11PM ...

If you subscribe to eMusic, you can download a iPod full of new music to try out at a relatively reasonable price -- the entire Naxos catalogue is available as well as a lot from other labels that feature new music (e.g., Cantaloupe, Black Box, Cedille, etc ...).

Klavier: Agreed! In fact, I think I'll cue up some Lutoslowski to wrap up my afternoon and move me on into the evening ...

Secondly, Oktavian portrayed by an older man (and realistically he would be, given the age at which singers’ voices generally mature) would seem unbelievably cruel: it’s appropriate for the young Oktavian to leave the Marschallin for Sophie; it would be heartless for a man who at least looked to be the Marschallin’s age or older to do so.

So it's certainly appropriate to worry about whether the Marschallin is matched by a man that looks too old to 'leave her without unbelievable cruelty', but definitely not appropriate to expect her male lover to look like a male. Yes. It is much more 'sensitive' to let the boy have a voluptuous female figure, perhaps even in Spandex. I wonder how resistible the teen-aged Sophies would find this as well--most likely they'd opt out and think it fine to leave him with the Marschallin.

Well, in this case, yes, although “sensitivity” isn’t the particular theatrical value I had in mind (and I certainly wasn't advocating a "voluptuous" Oktavian in spandex ). For Rosenkavalier to work, Oktavian’s choosing Sophie over the Marschallin has to be more than just “normal” or even "appropriate" as I earlier put it – it has to be innocent, which is possible only if Oktavian and Sophie are both very young. Perfect verisimilitude isn’t an option: given the idiom in which Strauss was working, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to write a major singing role for an actual 17 year old male. So what are the alternatives, and which of them is going to provide for the more convincing unfolding of the story at hand? Age-bending or gender-bending? Opera audiences are famously tolerant of casting that is completely out of whack with mere verisimilitude -- as a century of 200 pound, 47 year old Mimi’s has amply demonstrated -- but some choices will work better than others. Since there had already been a long tradition of trouser roles – Mozart’s Cherubino, Bellini’s Romeo, Verdi’s Oskar, Gounod’s Siebel, and Offenbach’s Nicklausse would have been more or less recent examples – writing Oktavian for a soprano was a ready alternative. Personally, I do find that -- onstage at least -- a 40 year-old woman can more convincingly emulate an adolescent male than a 40 year old man generally can, but not everyone agrees, obviously. I gather that what is discomfiting to some about Rosenkavalier is not so much that a teenage boy is being portrayed by a woman as it is that a teenage boy in an overtly sexual relationship is being portrayed by a woman. Of the examples I provided earlier, only Bellini's Romeo is equivalent to Oktavian in that regard, so perhaps Strauss was more groundbreaking than I’ve given him credit for.

Apologies for dragging this thread so far off topic!

On the other hand, Strauss specifically wrote Der Rosenkavalier for a soprano, and his vision was to replicate a 17-year old lad who hasn't "grown up" yet. There's a bit of artificiality that I think was intentional -- the wisdom of the Marschallin ultimately triumphs over the blissful but immature Oktavian and Sophie. If he wanted to write the role for a tenor, he would have (in fact, there's a tenor in Der Rosenkavalier). If a tenor (who could sing the notes -- Juan Diego Florez could essay the part, I bet) sang Oktavian, I'd liken it to Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake.

But didn't he write the part for a soprano for primarily musical reasons? yes, the '17-year old lad who hasn't "grown up" yet.', but this in itself by no means required a soprano.

No, in this case I think he really did want a woman in the role for reasons other than sound. First of all, the scene in which Oktavian passes himself off as Mariandel would be rather more difficult to bring off theatrically if he were sung by a man in drag (Ochs would seem like an even bigger dolt than he is). Secondly, Oktavian portrayed by an older man (and realistically he would be, given the age at which singers’ voices generally mature) would seem unbelievably cruel: it’s appropriate for the young Oktavian to leave the Marschallin for Sophie; it would be heartless for a man who at least looked to be the Marschallin’s age or older to do so.

I do admit to having some problems with this in 'Rosenkavalier', because I haven't seen one in which there is even any effort to make Octavian at least look somewhat masculine. This is annoying, because while one knows it is a woman, and is a woman only so that the music can be written this way, to emphasize the look of femininity by putting a female singer in tight pants makes it seem desexed.

Would anyone think it acceptable to cast a counter tenor in that role seeing as mezzos/contralto's seem interchangeable with counter tenors in opera seria these days. For example at Glyndebourne in 2005 I saw Sarah Connolly in the title role of Handel's Guilio Cesare but David Daniels sang the role in the same production last year.

Handel himself never cast countertenors in his operas. High male roles were cast either with castrati or women. He generally preferred castrati for heroic leads (e.g., Cesare in Giulio Cesare), but would cast a women en travesti if a star castrato wasn't available. (Opera Seria heroes were always sung by high voices; it was simply the convention of the day.) Handel did frequently cast women in non-heroic high male roles: the roles of Sesto (Giulio Cesare) and Ottone (Agrippina), for example were both originated by women in his company. The gender of the singer mattered less than the type of voice the singer had and its suitability for the role at hand.

I think that modern music is actually growing LESS esoteric and could be a rich quarry for dance. While Webern may continue to baffle ballet audiences, dancers, and choreographers, I suspect few would find Arvo Pärt particularly inaccessible, for example. The list of still-living composers whose music would be readily enjoyed by a broad audience is by no means a short one, but their work is unfortunately not as available or well-supported as it could be. Let’s hope that the advent of the internet and the mp3 file gets this music out there and in front of an audience more successfully than mainstream arts and media organizations have, and that choreographers find it, too. Yeah, Wolfgang Rihm is a little fierce and formidable, but Nico Muhly certainly isn’t. And there’s no need to limit ourselves to “concert music” per se: there are plenty of pros writing film and video game scores who should be able to produce a full-length ballet score no worse than Drigo’s.

I threw up my hands in despair at one point last year when I realized how many of the new (to me at least) ballets I’d seen in the space of a couple of months were set to a hodge-podge of extracts from Bach and his contemporaries. Since none of them were particularly “traditional” (although they all used ballet vocabulary) it would be hard to argue that it was a case of old steps requiring old music. Here’s what the choreographers seemed to need: 1) propulsive, non-stop rhythms; 2) short, self-contained blocks of music that could be strung together to support short, self-contained episodes of dancing; 3) straightforwardness of form (e.g., a readily discernable A-B-A structure); and 4) (and I’m being very cynical here, and I apologize) music that telegraphed the seriousness of the undertaking to the audience – if it’s set to Bach, it can’t possibly be a trifle, can it? I don’t care for most of Peter Martins’ choreography but I give him full marks for setting complete works by living composers (and he generally sets complete works by dead ones, too, of course). He rarely chooses anything likely to be terribly controversial, but at least it’s recent and given to us intact.