Helene

I thought the DVD gave a sense of what she might be like live, but not the whole picture. Maybe it was unfair to recommend the DVD. I think the whole ballet was a set up for Iago/Parrish to steal the show. The character would have done the same in The Moor's Pavane, if there wasn't room for Emilia to be portrayed as Lady MacBeth.

The response to Four Seasons was very positive in general. Kudelka's works that have been most criticized here are classics -- Swan Lake and Firebird -- and full lengths -- like The Contract. I know that in Seattle, I loved nearly all of Kent Stowell's full-lengths, but not so much his one-act ballets. Perhaps Kudelka's strength is the opposite. Regular NBoC-goers, please weigh in.

Ilya, I don't know if you have time to be able to find the DVD of Lar Lobovitch's Othello, but Tan's Desdemona was captured on film. It will give you a sense of what Paul is describing. Wow, and I thought Nana's Lied wasn't revived after Loscavio left SFB.

I think the pairings are particularly exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing Nakamura and Poretta, Korbes and Maraval, Nadeau and Wevers, Barker and Cruz, among the many others. And Le Yin is back, but no Bold (He and Nadeau make a particularly striking pair.)

I think that drb's adroit comment from the National Ballet of Canada thread applies: http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=12511

The Scherzo was choreographed for Patricia Wilde and Andre Eglevsky, and dates from right after The Nutcracker. It wouldn't have been the first time a piece was dropped or rechoreographed, because no one else had Wilde's technical ability. I saw Katrina Killian and Gen Horiuchi perform the movement on 19 February 1989. For some reason, I though this was a special performance -- at least at that time, the last night of the Winter Season was a benefit for the Dancers' Emergency Fund -- but 19 February sounds a like a week too soon to have been the final performance of the season. By this time, at least half of the women were technically able to perform the choreography. Perhaps that's why it was put aside; it was no longer a unique technical feat.

You remembered right. The thread on Four Seasons and Firebird from 2003 is here: http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=12511

I am astonished that the Company is marketing this ballet as traditional. In Canada, the hype was that it was a story about Siegfried, who rejected the corrupt court. The marketing approach wasn't quite as personal as Peter Sellars' synopsis of Tristan und Isolde in the Opera Bastille program ("Act 1: Two damaged, angry, desperate, and hurt human beings are on a long trip in the same boat. Neither expects to survive the journey. For Isolde, suicidal despair takes the form of violent, destructive moods swings, bitter sarcasm, uncontrollable weeping and the need to talk everything out. For Tristan, it is the scarred, painful silence of emotional blockage and denial...), but when I saw this Swan Lake, I had to scratch my head, because Siegfried was played well within the dramatic tradition, especially if Nureyev's and others' attempts to expand Siegfried's role are counted. I guess the gang-rape was so tasteful, I missed it. I must have been looking upstage. I had forgotten one detail: when Siegfried is about to be forced to choose, all four princesses are lined up in a row, on their stools. Siegfried pushes one of them off -- I can't remember who is at the downstage right end -- and as she and her handler leave the stage in a huff, he replaces her with Odile. I guess this act of rudeness signifies his complicity with corruption.

But what do the other three acts do to justify a full-length production?

I don't know if anyone has matched Seymour, one of the great dramatic ballerinas, in this role, but Ferri has given a very passionate interpretation of it. I wouldn't say it was as earthy as I've heard Seymour described, but it sounds closer to Seymour on a scale of Seymour to Fonteyn. It's a rarity when an established artist goes far out of his/her comfort zone to adapt another style or approach, especially when s/he will be compared to the dancer on whom the role was based, although it happens with the original cast as well. (In Theme and Variations, Balanchine was reported to be frustrated with Youskevitch, who performed the role "square." In his memoir Martins describes how he was replaced by Sean Lavery in the first movement of Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3 because he wasn't getting it.) In Seymour's description, it was a political decision to cast Fonteyn/Nureyev in the roles. MacMillan was far from running the Company at that time. Balanchine repetiteurs, like Farrell, have described the challenges they have when they try to cast the ballet for other companies with strict hierarchies. I think the role supports a wide range of interpretations. Even if the rest of the cast is performing an earthier version, a romantic Juliet, a character whose family attempts to shelter her, can be seen as a contrast to outside society.

I have two suspicions about how the men are chosen on this show: the first is that they appeal to wider demographics than the women, with fan bases outside the norm, and the second is that the men who have the same type of fan base as the women -- soap opera actors, basically -- wouldn't be caught dead failing at this. There was a marginally funny, but sometimes apt article on salon.com -- possibly subscription only -- about how none of the people on the show are stars, at least currently, but some of them are related to stars. Certainly no current movie or stage stars would consider this. It's too much of a popularity contest, just like this year's Marshall's skating competition, where Michelle Kwan won the overwhelming majority of voting with programs that were clearly substandard. And there are far too many ways to fail.

Whatever I think of individual Swan Lake productions, I also think that a production of the ballet in NYC is different than a production anywhere else, except possibly London and Paris, because there is at least one other permanent company performing the same ballet and numerous companies that tour with the ballet. I wonder about alternate visions of the ballet in cities where that IS Swan Lake for as long as it takes to amortize the costs of all of those sets and costumes. (Ex: Wheeldon in Philadelphia, Kudelka in Toronto). I haven't seen the Martins version of Swan Lake, live or on TV. I have seen Martins Sleeping Beauty multiple times, though. I loved the sets and costumes and much about it, but what I disliked about the version was the handling of the fairies, the Jewels divertissements in the Wedding scene, and the self-crowning Napoleonic apotheosis. What the fairies and Jewels had in common was breakneck speed and lack of air and perfume. From the reviews I've read here and in the press of Swan Lake, it sounds like Martins extended this throughout Swan Lake. If I'm going to sit through a multiple act classic story ballet, I don't want it pared down to dance, dance, dance for three hours, just as I don't want to go to see a standard production of Carmen and hear "Habanera," "Seguidilla," "Flower Song," "Quintet," "Toreador Song," and the final scene, without the contrasting scenes and drama in-between. Balanchine knew to limit this approach to a one acter, with a maximum of 40 minutes; I love the Act II version that Balanchine choreographed for NYCB. Peter Brook, when he took a similar approach to Carmen, stripped down the drama to four or five singers and restructured the drama to fit a chamber approach. But it wasn't marketed as the same opera. The court scenes aren't there just for pretty, endless, boring dancing: they're to set the stage, literally, and also to provide context and tension. The court is the foil to Siegfried, and the delay until he finds what he's yearning. It's what he's up against. But "It" is also a classical convention that spanned the different forms of dancing, from character to classical, and a range of characters, a mini-pagent of sorts. In a full length Swan Lake, I want to see range of types of dancing that Petipa would recognize, and I want mime. I don't want to cut straight to the "act" and see it over and over again. I want the balletic equivalent of foreplay.

There were a couple of things that I did like about the "handlers," although they did occasionally distract from the divertissements. In the standard version, there are unaccompanied princesses. Either they are generic, when the divertissements are entertaining tributes to the prince sent from foreign lands, or they are foreign princesses leading their own contingent. von Rothbart makes an appearance with Odile. He's always a striking figure who often chats up the Queen, sitting next to her or across the stage in a similarly prominent position. But he's an unusual contrast to the protocol. In Kudelka's production, each one of the princesses has her chaperone, and each has his own personality and relationship to the princess. That relationship plays into the way the princess plays to the court, and how much she is interested or appearing against her own will, and what their strategy is for winning. ("Don't touch until you've paid" vs. "Get a good look.") If I'm remembering correctly, in the Russian dance, the princess is distant and proud, and her handler is very protective of her, in a patriarchal sort of way. In my opinion, what this does is two-fold: it puts von Rothbart in the same context, which makes dramatic sense, and it is a set-up for the emotional range that Odile acts out to capture Siegfried.

I never got Mostel either. To swerve off topic for a moment, I was raised on his Fiddler, but thought he was a buffoonish. (Although, according to the shows writers, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, when interviewed on Fresh Air, they offered to cut the contemplative last verse of "If I Were a Rich Man," thinking it out of place and character with the rest of the song and Mostel's characterization, and he insisted on keeping it in, saying that this was the real Tevye.) When I heard the new Broadway cast recording with Alfred Molina, I couldn't believe how moving the character was, especially in "Do You Love Me?" Back to the regularly scheduled topic

I agree that Schubertiade needed some editing, and that the orchestrated version of the "Serenade" (?) was a mistake, but I thought the piece had a modern voice and great roles, particularly for Kyra Nichols, Joseph Duell, and Ib Andersen, as well as a sweet one for Nichol Hlinka. I thought the roles were tailor-made for the dancers. Martins lost me with Fearful Symmetries, where to me, it looked like all of the lead women were molded into Heather Watts clones.

I just edited both of our posts with the attribution.

I just placed a pre-order. Shipping via airmail, the total was £14.56, or approximately, $27 (US). Thank you so much, chrisk217!

It would be very difficult to choose between dancing Apollo, and dancing with Ib Andersen as one of the muses. If the latter, Polyhymnia or Calliope; then there's more to watch from backstage. Of course, it wouldn't be so bad being flung around in Spartacus by Vladimir Vasiliev , although Crassus would be more fun, except there wouldn't have been the chance to see Maris Liepa from backstage.

I saw the original movie in Bonn, Germany in 1977, with subtitles. Talk about being in a group of three with no other laughter in the movie theater. From the reviews I've read, it sounds like there's less to laugh about in the re-make.

Perhaps Pina Bausch?

In Schubertiade there was not wholesale partner switching, but there were a couple of trios, in which one dancer chose between two others. In that ballet, I thought Martins successfully provided structure, not organization. Perhaps Martins' approach was still under the influence of Balanchine -- the ballet is a relation to Liebeslieder, however distant -- but it had a palpable and sophisticated tension. I've never seen Morgen, so I can't compare them.