Helene

Gorgeous photos.

Star Trek could be the great space opera, too. Seattle Opera just posted this photo of one of the Act II dancers: https://www.facebook...53776037&type=1 The caption says they were modeled on Chinese women warriors' garb. They had some tricky choreography to do in those costumes, including a low-ish full jumping turn to a lateral fall to the ground. I cringed when they had to do this at the end of Act II, after spending 20 minutes or so kneeling and sitting on their heels for "In questa reggia" and the riddle scene.

I'm not sure anything describes "at ease" more than Cynthia Gregory softly rolling off pointe from her balances. There are so many magnificent details from that performance. I think my favorite is the way she presents her heel before and during her final curtsey. Many thanks, kbarber!

It's funny how we see these things: I always thought he was based on JFK, who could appear intellectually lazy, and whose interest in women was, em, formidable, but, as Lyndon Johnson learned the hard way, underestimating him was deadly. I didn't even think the original Kirk had other people do his homework, and he was the only one to outsmart the magic computer by changing the rules.

"Surprise Me" selects a page, which could be random or algorith-driven: the photo might not come up by clicking it. Also, I got a message that I'd get a bigger sample by logging in. I'm not sure if Bart was logged in. If not, then the photo might not be in the smaller sample for users not logged in. If Bart wasn't logged in, there might be a greater chance of it being selected.

It's always hard for me to remember that Captain Kirk had much of a brain, either, but he must have, or he wouldn't have passed all of those science courses. (Or, I should say William Shatner as Captain Kirk. I'm fairly sure Chris Pine's Kirk excelled at video games.)

What a fantastic story! I <3 Birgit Nilsson. She was right, and Caballe is still singing, although in smaller roles now. (She'll be 80 next year, according to Wikipedia.) Caballe didn't have a small voice, either. I heard her sing "Norma" at the Met from the Family Circle, and we could hear her clear as a bell. My favorite personal Nilsson story was when I heard her and Eva Marton in "Die Frau ohne Schatten." The crowd was screaming for the two of them, demanding curtain call after curtain call. They came out in front of the curtain, and Nilsson, standing closer to the separation snuck off and held the curtain shut, so that Marton had to take a solo curtain call. Did I mention that I <3 Birgit Nilsson? Stonikas is quite young, but in this production, she only sang two performances, the Sunday matinees, a week apart. The Opening Cast Turandot has a Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday run. (I'm not sure why the alternate cast isn't singing Friday night, which would be nearly a week after yesterday, but Stonikas is singing the Star Spangled Banner at the Seattle Mariners game on Wednesday night.) Her teacher/coach is Jane Eaglen, and I think she's is fine vocal hands. She'll sing one Leonore in "Fidelio" with Seattle Opera in "Fidelio" (argh, I can't go to that one, my original subscription ticket). According to this interview on the Seattle Opera blog, because the tessitura is different for each, she doesn't sing them on the same day. She'd says she'd like to learn "Sieglinde" and to sing the Empress in "Die Frau ohne Schatten" in the next five years. She seems cautious about large dramatic roles, and understands the difference between singing an excerpt and the entire role. The really great news is that she had a child last year, and it hasn't affected her vocal chords, which is always a worry for young singers. I almost forgot about Chapa's curtain call, where he threw a kiss to the audience with a little flourish that made me think of Mariusz Kwiecien channeling Johnny Depp playing d'Artagnon.

I was going to skip "Turandot," because I'd only seen it in the pre-supertitles days, and my experience with the opera was loving the end of Act I as much as anything in opera, but hating Act II, having heard little but shrillness in the title role and watched repetitive and silly renditions of Ping/Pang/Pong, making it not worth sitting around to hear "Nessun Dorma." It was the Tebaldi/Bjoerling/Tozzi/Leinsdorf disk with the ending of Act I starting with "Signore ascolta" that I had to replace over time: the rest of the set remained nearly untouched, and I listened to "Nessun Dorma" on all of the tenor arias albums I had (Bjorling, Corelli, Tucker, Domingo, Del Monaco, etc.) Thanks to the babbling brook of social media, with enticing interviews and previews posted to Seattle Opera Blog -- to Jonathan Dean and his group -- a slow, soothing, continuous presence on Twitter and Facebook, I didn't. If I had, I would be retroactively kicking myself for years to come. The production, by the inseparable director/choreographer Renard Doucet and set/costume designer Andre Barbe and their long-time collaborator, lighting designer Guy Simard, is a and dramatic knockout in which both elements build and build, using about 100 people, including chorus and supers. Speight Jenkins explained that the orchestra uses 85 players -- the three percussionists were featured in an article in the program -- the same size as the orchestra for "Tristan und Isolde." What made it affordable is that it's a co-production with four other companies, Pittsburgh Opera, where it premiered last March, Minnesota Opera, where it goes next, Utah Opera, and Cincinnati Opera.From the video linked above and some of the photos you can see the deliberately circular elements in the sets and costumes, representing the circle of life, and secondarily, at least to my eyes, the ways in which people are trapped in repetitive behavior. (As soprano Marcy Stonikas notes, in this staging, Ping, Pang, and Pong yawn before she sings "In questa reggia", because they've heard this dozens of times by now, at least from their incomplete count of fallen princes.) The center of the stage is a circular platform leading to an upstage tunnel, surrounded by a raked, ringed platform with single steps painted to look like blood-stained marble. In Act I, there was a simple, small two-tiered circular "wedding cake" platform in the middle of the platform, used by the dancers to create a number of striking images. Making a three dimensional globe were stage wide circular arches with circular motifs leading to a large circular moon (scrim) and, of course, the circular gong to the side. Reliefs of the heads of some of the unsuccessful suitors were hung in yet another circle. The director and designer took Chinese numerology into consideration, and it can't be a co-incidence that the only square (cubic) element was behind the circular scrim, the throne for the Emperor, since four is the number of death. As designer Barbe said, "It starts with the moon. There’s this big circle onstage at the beginning of the first act, when they sing about the moon, which is the symbol of Turandot. And inside the moon there’s a box in which she and the Emperor, whom they call figlio del cielo (son of the skies) both appear. He’s literally carrying the sky on his shoulders, and he’s tired of doing this. He wants his daughter to marry and give him a grandson, some future." With the exception of Calaf (black) and the three ministers (aqua), the sets and costumes were primarily bathed in red, a fortuitous color in China, or were in white, the color of mourning, for Turandot and her ladies. The costumes differentiated not only between the peasants and the court, but among the various factions and hierarchies of the court. The dancers' costumes especially wafted in the air as they moved, and were the most striking: in Act I, they dancers wore conical hats with a big red feather at the top, and armor like grey and silver grading to red, billowy bottoms, sleeves, and capes. In the choreography they stepped on the little wedding cake platform on the center platform facing each other, and joined arms, leaning back and creating a sunburst effect and then tilting forward touching feathers in the center, like a flower. In the second and last acts, the dancers costumes had four poles with billowing fabric and wore big headpieces; they had more challenging choreography, especially given the costumes. The maidens whom Ping, Pang, and Pong summoned to bribe Calaf into leaving avoided stereotypical shimmying, but instead shimmered in their white, silky dresses, like wisps of cloud. Until the final over-the-top (in context) PDA embrace -- okay, thematically she show she's human and all and there's a new world order, but still -- there were reams of processional, ceremony, and formality, and Doucet's way of moving all of groups onstage with purpose and integrating them all, especially the dancers, and using gesture was spectacular. Speight Jenkins explained that Puccini wrote Ping, Pang, and Pong as Commedia figures, which Doucet ran with, even incorporating British music hall in the mix, giving them choreography and stage business more complex than Mao's women in the Met's "Nixon in China," with the added need for spot-on comic timing, which Patrick Carfizzi (Ping), Julius Ahn (Pang), and Joseph Hu (Pong) showed to perfection. Carfizzi, with his rich baritone, was the alpha of the three, and I curse the fog at SFO that delayed my June flight by five hours and made me miss his Henry Kissinger in "Nixon in China." The usually interminable "I have a dacha, oy, I need to retire, this job is killing me" scene at the beginning of Act II went by in a flash. One of the most magical scenes was after the death of Liu, the point at which Puccini stopped composing before his death a few months later. The orchestra went silent, and as nearly 100 people slowly followed the funeral procession off into the wings, a single figure sat kneeling, until the stage was otherwise empty. He stood down stage center, and then ran into the tunnel and offstage, as if the soul of Puccini was being whisked away. The attention to detail was amazing. For example, instead of a boisterous crowd knocking Timur to the ground, a peasant was manhandled downstage center by the royal guards as Timur and Liu made their way through the crowd, and it was he, blindly trying to escape the torture, who knocked down the blind man. I don't know how many of these moments I missed; it was like trying to watch a Ratmansky story ballet. All of the depths and subtleties of the chorus and supers and their graceful interaction on stage made the four principal characters an issue dramatically. They had to stand out from the crowds, but at least in the Opening Night cast, they tended toward stock opera movement in sharp contrast to rest of the performers. It wasn't quite park-and-bark, but came dangerously close, particularly for Turandot Lori Philips and Calaf Antonello Palombi, who acted with a lot of bluster. I half expected him to pat Turandot on the head in the last act: he was cut out of the same testosterone-fueled, condescending, male-dominance cloth as Cavaradossi. His was the Captain Kirk of Calafs. Usually it's Turandot who is considered the inhuman character/ice princess until she inexplicably falls for Calaf and does a 180. (Then everyone blames it on Puccini having died before finishing the work.) But Liu means as little to Calaf as she does to Turandot until about the very end, and his blustering outrage about her death is a bit late in the game, if he doesn't have an equal transformation to Turandot's. (Palombi didn't convince me that he suddenly turned into Mr. Sensitive or even Mr. Thoughtful.) In this staging, after Timur explains that Liu saved him and begged alms for him, Calaf went to his bag -- I half expected him to take out a few coins and toss them to her for her trouble -- and handed his father something to drink, ignoring the fact that Liu might be a little thirsty herself, having supported his father physically and emotionally in exile. (I didn't keep watching to see if Timur gave her a sip.) He's a royal, and the peasantry, no matter how close to him, is just not on his radar. In this production, Turandot is self-protective, afraid, and, eventually conflicted. It's not that she isn't moved by Liu, this strange creature who's willing to die for a man she barely knows, but her fear is driving all of her behavior. This is borne out in the libretto, in which, according to Jenkins, Puccini was not only a participant, but with which he wrote that he was satisfied. Peter Rose, who played Timur in both casts, reminded me of the short story where an actor explains that to appear drunk convincingly, an actor has to try to move as if he were sober. His blind man would have been more effective if he had tried to walk like a sighted person. However, he shined after the death of Liu, his stentorian tones filling the house, and his curse on the kingdom was bone-chilling. Liu doesn't have much acting leeway, always trying to be helpful or recede into the background, and how much she's integrated into the action is largely dependent on chemistry with the other cast members. In the Opening Night cast, I didn't see a lot of chemistry among the characters. Vocally Lori Phillips has a strong voice, but I found it much like other Turandot's I had heard, including my beloved Birgit Nilsson (on recordings): harsh and strident, although she was very moving in the scene in which after Calaf answers the riddles, she begged her father to let her out of the bargain, showing her fear and vulnerability. Lina Tetriani's Liu was strong, and she could float a nice pianissimo, and while a big, dramatic voice, I found it hard for the character. If Palombi's Calaf was thinking below the waist, his voice made it almost not matter: the sound is gorgeous and resonant, and it's easy to respond viscerally to it, like after swallowing a nice, warm brandy. He was made for Puccini's sweeping, dramatic lines. In the Q&A after yesterday's matinee, Speight Jenkins said that this is the first production he's seen in which the dramatic parallels between "Turandot" and "Siegfried" were clear. I think this was obvious to anyone who had seen both operas, and the parallels actually extend back to "Die Walkure": a woman bargains with her father to create a heroic test, with failure=death (implied in the Ring), to vet prospective suitors, the father is happy with the hero -- although in "Turandot," he's not trying to match his daughter with his grandson -- and when that suitor passes the test, tries to convince him to leave her in her virginal state, even as her feelings awaken. What's most similar are the conversations and negotiations within the opera, and for that to work requires subtle listening and reacting in the moment. For me, the second cast was golden. As Liu Grazia Doronzio had sweetness in her tone, and she filled McCaw Hall with a golden, drama-filled soprano with wide ranging dynamics and many colors. Luis Chapa doesn't have as big or naturally beautiful voice as Palombi, but he's an exponentially better actor and stage presence: he has the talent for stillness while commanding attention -- the only other male singer I've ever seen do this was Samuel Ramey as Pope Leo in "Atilla," a much smaller role -- and somehow showing the audience that he is thinking and absorbing what goes on around him. His "Non piangere, Liu" -- maybe my favorite tenor aria -- was not just "Here's a tissue, Liu," but conflicted, having just found his father and being about to risk it all. "Nessun Dorma" emerged out of the fabric of the scene, following Puccini's genius. In both the give-and-take of riddle solving and in the climactic duet towards the end of the opera, his attention to what Turandot was saying was palpable. As Timur contracted in agony as his son once again seemed to drag defeat from the jaws of victory (and with tragic results), instead of demanding his rights to marry her, he gave Turandot an option, not just because he's smug, although his Calaf was not lacking confidence, but because he wanted Turandot to come to him of her own will. It's not often we see a thinking man's Puccini tenor, but what was even more remarkable, was how much chemistry he had with Marcy Stonikas' Turandot. Perhaps the saying that there's nothing sexier than a man who listens bore fruit on that stage. Stonikas has a big, beautiful, clear dramatic soprano sound, and she sang as if she understood every word, not just the general arc, and not only what she was saying, but what the other characters were, too. She reacted to specifics, and her thinking was clear, too, especially as she started to formulate her plans to learn Calaf's name, moments after he gave her an out. A former member of the Seattle Young Artists' Program, she doesn't have a very long performing bio, but any General Director with half and ear should be ringing her now and trying to book her years in advance. Her voice is epic. (ETA: Seattle Opera just posted a short excerpt to this page.) It's almost getting to sound like a cliche to talk about the excellence of the Seattle Opera Chorus, but under Beth Kirshhoff's direction, Renaud Doucet's directing, and Asher Fisch's conducting, they sang and moved magnificently, and were the spine of the work. With so many players and so many sounds built in, a not-so-subtle approach can be exciting to hear, but, while it should seem obvious but doesn't always happen, Fisch listened and heard the score particularly its light and shade, and he got the orchestra to play it that way. (A small clip of Palombi at the end of Act II, but listen to what the orchestra is doing, too, especially the second half. It's what makes Fisch such a splendid conductor of Wagner and the orchestra consistently a glory of the Seattle Ring.) To anyone in Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and Cincinnati when this production comes along, run to see it.

Given programs like Expat Shield and HideMyAss, the reportedly magnificent coverage by BBC available online, and increasing speeds and bandwidth on cell phones, it's one more way that NBC can cut off its financial nose to spite its face.

I thought I remembered seeing a listing for this on DVD, and in my search, found these excerpts on YouTube with Obraztsova, which gives some tastes of it and the score: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coP12VCLnqY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVczehnLVdA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6uAtSZhv44 The text says it's from a full-length Blu Ray DVD, but I can't find a listing for it anywhere. This looks more homemade:

Ah, but not yet: according to Bob Costas last night, not only are athletes going to be on Fallon (and Leno?) all week, but every morning this week, they're doing some sort of Olympic recap. I think CTV/TSN/SportsNet has cut the umbilical cord, but there's not as much to revisit for the Canadian audience.

NYCB just posted Wendy Whelan's photo of the couple on their wedding day:

Click the little diagonal arrows on the bottom right of the video, since the video editing is a bit ?? at times, and be careful what you wish for. Not even the Bolshoi, Mariinsky, and Paris Opera Ballet have 200 ballerinas. Was the corps a punk homage to Ashton's chickens in "La Fille mal gardee"?

Anchoring a team to a WR when the second-place US team ran faster than any other US team is the third part of Bolt's extraordinary accomplishment, two Olympics in a row.

Thank you for the news, PeggyR. I loved his dancing, and HNB is lucky to have him.

It sounds like the Mariinsky used the original ending. When PNB did "Emeralds for the first time, the majority of the audience thought it ended there, with good reason. Balanchine also added a solo for the second female soloist.

No, other companies perform/have performed the full version recently. Until this year, PNB performed Francia Russell's staging; Peter Boal decided to stage the version he knew and danced last season. I've seen the long version with Ballet Arizona (2004, 2009 with "Nymphs") Royal Ballet of Flanders (2008, no names in program for the two women), Dance Theatre of Harlem (2004, "Nymphs") and San Francisco Ballet (2004, "Mother" instead of "Leto," and "Handmaidens".) Francia Russell is staging the full version for Oregon Ballet Theatre this coming season. Balanchine himself endorsed Russell's plan to stage the versions she knew from her time at NYCB and early work as a hand-picked stager, and in the "Six Ballerinas" documentary, Maria Tallchief recalls how she told him she was staging the version of "Agon" that she knew, and he told her that was right. The only public story I've heard about a specific version of the choreography being forced was when John Taras was alive and owned the rights to "Symphony in C." He insisted on a specific version of one of the sections, and Peter Martins refused. At the latest lecture demo at PNB, the most fascinating part of the presentation was when dancers did excerpts of new and old versions of Balanchine ballets side-by-side.