Mel Johnson

No, Bathilde is not an "insertion" in the Zuraitis reading of the score. That version is the 1841 uncut version. The cut to the fast curtain music seems to have come about in the 1884 Petipa revival, and the lento music is an interpolation from the 1903 Pavlova debut in the role, supervised by Petipa, even though he was in forced retirement.

Haven't we been over this ground before, further up this subject forum? The original ending was an extended mime farewell scene among Albrecht, Bathilde, Giselle, and Wilfrid. I don't know who Petipa got to shorten it and/or add the lento section (Minkus? Glazunov? Drigo?), but the original goes on for quite awhile. The only recording I've ever heard of it was by Algis Zuraitis with the Bolshoi Orchestra, but I don't think it's available today.

RE: original topic of this thread: I always thought Tristan & Isolde would work. There's all that Wagner music, or "Tintagel Suite" by ...? (sorry can't remember composer), and I think somebody at the RB did do a ballet called "Tintagel" but I think it was more about King Arthur?

Someone at RB DID do a Tintagel ballet - Ashton. Only thing, he didn't do it for RB, he did it for NYCB. Music was by Sir Arnold Bax, and included several short works including "The Garden of Fand". The title was "Picnic at Tintagel" and it is a lost Ashton. They tried to put it back together again, but nobody could remember it sufficiently.

If I have to pick only one, it's Delibes' "Naîla" waltz, whether it's choreographed, or just used as an entr'acte.

Saveliev, Simkin, Hammoudi, Salstein, De Long and Radetsky partnered the ballerinas but didn't have anything much else to do.

But wait, there's a lovely group variation for the men set to an Irving-orchestrated piano mazurka. Surely that has to count for something!

And Cornejo has a lot of simpatico going for him, even besides his outstanding technique. Simkin has his own brand, too, so it will be interesting to see what he makes of the role.

Something in my memory-box recalls that she had a leadership role in protecting ballet companies during the Great Purges of 1934-38. Perhaps the Voice of Russia article conflated the two, or just telescoped one into the other. It happens all over the journalism world.

The way that paragraph is written, it sounds like she was IN the ballet, but not leading. Children's corps would be a logical explanation.

All of "Love in Bath" was once recorded on the Angel label. Additional numbers would seem to spell a two-act version which might mitigate the slow stretches. I'll have to look into that. Thanks, leonid!

I didn't think so; musically, it's got "good bones", but in terms of narrative, it could use "punching and tightening", to continue the Broadway metaphor.

Does anybody know whether the Sir Thomas Beecham-arranged score (a Handel pastiche) was ever produced by anyone? It's a longish one-act with a libretto about the courtship of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Elizabeth Linley. It doesn't include the famous duel(s), but seems to include a lot of material which suggests a sort of eighteenth-century "Enigma Variations".

As described on its own website, it's rather similar to many juried shows in both performing and fine arts. A jury decides which works are to be presented, then when they are seen as an entire exhibition, the jury decides which is most deserving of a prize. If no work meets the standards of the jury for any given award, no award in that category is made. It is therefore theoretically possible to have an exhibition with no winners!

From the title and the leading post, I'd say that the question is along the lines of, "Does a dancer sometimes let it go at a less-prestigious venue? Dance as if they're phoning it in?" The answer has to be yes, sometimes. But it will get you into trouble with the ballet master and the director, at least. Dancers are ethically bound to put out the best show they can for all audiences, even in Podunk!

As has been pointed out above, usually a flash mob will do some sort of absurdist shtick, and while opera in the market is kind of absurd, it does have a certain cachet to it!

It's sort of derived from "flasher". The group arrives in any number of different ways at the site for their activity, and suddenly begins doing whatever it is they've resolved to do. Then, when people have noticed what they're doing, they equally suddenly stop and depart, usually rapidly.

Don't overlook the glitz factor in all this. In 1959, Castro had not identified himself as a Communist, and had, in fact, denounced it in that year. He was a celebrity revolutionary, as conflicted as that sounds, and was a darling of the jet set as an authentic hero.

Not sure that Castro's all having the 'glitz' of a 'celebrity revolutionary' isn't much in the way of a mitigating factor.

I'm not sure I intended it as mitigating. After all, a wife may not be compelled against her will to testify against her husband in most cases, but colluding in his treason is bad form, at least. Just ask Margaret Shippen Arnold (Mrs. Benedict).

Should I wish to enter a defense, I think I would go for diminished capacity, as throwing your armed force's brassards overboard, making them indistinguishable from pirates, and retaining evidence onboard would serve as a pretty good contribution to the corpus of a defense based on insufficient brains, but I would never do that; but I just did, didn't I.

Don't overlook the glitz factor in all this. In 1959, Castro had not identified himself as a Communist, and had, in fact, denounced it in that year. He was a celebrity revolutionary, as conflicted as that sounds, and was a darling of the jet set as an authentic hero.

Yes, certainly, that's a true evaluation of the source of the choreography. It is solidly based on the vocabulary and style of the pre-Franco-Prussian War French school, and even makes graceful bows in the direction of the Petipa restagings of earlier choreographers' works (cf. Giselle et al.) It is the work of a stagewise scholar.

However, directly attributing the choreography to Marie Taglioni is, at best, overreaching.

This is a lot like playing "Six Degrees of Separation".

OK, here's the kicker - Marie-Paul married Prince Joseph zu Windisch-Graetz, and one of her great-nieces, Princess Stephanie zu Windisch-Graetz (b. 1939) is a recognized professional photographer today. Her work often features shots made with rather low light levels, contrary to the technology used to produce our subject cabinet photo.

I'm curious about the photographer. What I think I make out of the name is Aärfe. Is that anywhere near correct, rg?

A direct inspection of the print would be necessary, but the technology of the carte-de-visite and cabinet card photograph is certainly traceable. The most likely candidate, in my mind, is an albumen-paper print which would have been made from a collodion-process (usually glass-plate) negative which could have been made anytime and anywhere after the invention of the process about 1851. All you would need was the negative and a sensitized paper to make the positive. As long as the negative survives, it's good for making prints. I've made several from some American Civil War glass plates, and the process, whether on original-technology or modern paper, produces photographs of superior sharpness and clarity.

That's part of "learn easily". I was only lucky enough to have been doing research at Harvard when the notebooks were given there. A

librarian dropped that they had just been catalogued, and I asked to see some of them and found that the Stepanov notation can be doped out, if you work from the known to the unknown. I compared my knowledge of the "Bluebird" pas de deux with what was on the staves and found that I could learn to recognize certain steps right away. I then compared the Nutcracker pas de deux, and found some interesting variations on what I had learned from old Ballet Russe dancers. In some cases, what I read on the page didn't match what I knew at all. Maybe it was "first-cast, second-cast" differences. The Stepanov is not highly intuitive, but if you are familiar with some of its predecessor notation systems, you can figure out what's what. It also helps that Sergeyev and others made handwritten cues in many places. You just have to know what "pas de basque" looks like in Cyrillic!

Cristian has mentioned the Stepanov notation of the original productions of the great Russian Imperial ballets, but not everybody can learn easily how to read the stuff, and the originals are in the Harvard Libraries. However, for Swan Lake, Cyril W. Beaumont wrote out the Nicolai Sergeyev stagings from the Sadler's Wells productions, using Cecchetti nomenclature. This choreographic "script" can be found in Beaumont's The Ballet Called Swan Lake. He did a similar treatment of Giselle, too. Sergeyev had these notations in his possession when he made stagings for companies after he left Russia.

Yes, it was a special concert assembled for the centenary of Catherine the Great's death. Mathilde Kschessinskaya was a sort of associate producer, selecting the variations and suggesting to Petipa who should do them. No doubt, she wouldn't have suggested anybody who posed a threat to her dominance (M.K. on Pavlova: "Poor skinny little thing, and no turnout at all!"), but she could read audiences, and knew what they liked.