Helene

Wow!!! Thank you for the news, Alymer

Next in the series is Jonathan Porretta: When he speaks about favorite roles, the clips are from Tetley's "Rite of Spring", "Prodigal Son", and "in the middle, somewhat elevated". I love the petite allegro he does right after the Forsythe clip. In the final montage, I recognized him in: "Rubies" Mercutio (Maillot's "Romeo et Juliette") "Square Dance" (male solo) Boy in Brown from "Dances at a Gathering", with Chalnessa Eames (Apricot) "One flat thing reproduced", with, I think, Jodie Thomas to the right. "Symphony in C" 3rd Movement, with Kaori Nakamura I think the Quijada piece, with James Moore to the right and Barry Kerollis to the left "Agon" first pas de trois. Four Temperaments (see post #3 below) I can't tell who the women are from that short clip. I'm not sure what the last clip is from, where he's wearing the brown shirt and black tights. The score is by William Lin-Yee.

I've not yet seen Osipova live, but from this clip, it's less about the individual positions than the flow, energy, and phrasing. She had the opportunity to create context because the clip was longer, and the turns were only part of the whole. For people who've seen a squid swim, there's a unique, undulating, silken quality to the way the membranes move in water, and that's the first thing I thought of watching Valdes do the turns. I found it quite beautiful, but I also have no idea how it fits into the whole.

I completely agree about the joys of going to NYCO. In four decades of opera-going, Lisa Saffer in "Die Soldaten" was the greatest performance I've seen and heard.

I take it they didn't change Edgardo's awful blue jacket...

Excellent -- thank you! I didn't see the cast he was in; the casts for the two performances I saw were identical. That makes it highly unlikely that it was a breakout solo

He is, and humor is a fresh aspect of his own choreography, but he's more than that, and he shows it in this role: there's always a complexity behind his comic roles that gives them power and often (depending on the character) pathos. Argh, I watched that clip so many times to figure it out, and I can't, even full screen and freezing the frame. I dug up the old programs, and it's possible that the dancer was in the cast I didn't see, but the only three dancers that have hair that dark are Batkhurel Bold, James Moore, and Sakvannara Sar. I don't remember Bold's hair every being that floppy, and the dancer doesn't look tall and leggy enough to be Bold. Proportionally, it looks more like Sar to me, which would mean a breakout solo from the corps, which I think this part was. I've heard that the $5 studio rehearsals have been sell-outs. I've only been to a couple of the pre-performance lectures, and they were nicely attended, as were all of the dancer/choreographer discussions at Elliot Bay. There was a wonderful afternoon-long lecture, demo, discussion for "Coppelia", and a good number of seats were taken, and I don't remember any empty seats for either of Doug Fullington's "Balanchine's Petipa" presentations. These are all relatively small-venues, though, the largest being the 300-400 seat Lecture Hall where the pre-performance presentations are held. For these the tickets to the performances have been sold already. I'm not sure how measurable the programs' influence at the box office is. When there are cheap tickets, people show up for them based on the lobby-blocking rush ticket lines, and I see far more people younger than I at the ballet than at the opera. I don't think the economy can sustain even subscription prices, and it is depressing to see empty seats at great performances. I know not all subscribers and full-price ticket-buyers feel this way, but I'd rather see butts in seats, if people have paid a small fee. However, performing arts institutions can't afford to alienate their long-time subscribers, who are often donors, to bring in new audiences whose long-time loyalty is not proven. Since there is so much time for people's dollars and time, I suspect these programs are a way to encourage loyalty to the organization and to help arts "customers" to focus on their product. (Sorry to sound like a direct marketing person: once in the blood, it's never out.)

PNB has published a entitled "Tharp's Opus 111-The Restaging": and one of Chalnessa Eames, Jonathan Porretta, and Olivier Wevers rehearsing "Afternoon Ball" with commentary: Casting for the first week in on the site: Friday, 5 Nov 7:30pm Opus 111: Carla Körbes Batkhurel Bold Lindsi Dec Seth Orza* Carrie Imler Josh Spell* Rachel Foster Kiyon Gaines Chalnessa Eames James Moore Sarah Ricard Orza Lucien Postlewaite 
Afternoon Ball: Jonathan Porretta Olivier Wevers Chalnessa Eames Ariana Lallone Jeffrey Stanton 
Waterbaby Bagatelles: Batkhurel Bold Carla Körbes Karel Cruz Carrie Imler Rachel Foster* Lucien Postlewaite Benjamin Griffiths Saturday, 6 Nov 2pm Opus 111: Carla Körbes Batkhurel Bold Ariana Lallone Karel Cruz Carrie Imler Josh Spell Kylee Kitchens Barry Kerollis Chalnessa Eames James Moore Sarah Ricard Orza Lucien Postlewaite Afternoon Ball: Benjamin Griffiths* Andrew Bartee* Maria Chapman* Laura Gilbreath* Jerome Tisserand Waterbaby Bagatelles: Batkhurel Bold Lesley Rausch* Olivier Wevers* Lindsi Dec* Chalnessa Eames* Jerome Tisserand* James Moore* Saturday, 6 Nov 7:30pm Opus 111: Maria Chapman* William Lin-Yee* Ariana Lallone Karel Cruz Carrie Imler Josh Spell Rachel Foster Kiyon Gaines Lesley Rausch Jerome Tisserand Leah O'Connor* Benjamin Griffiths* Afternoon Ball: Jonathan Porretta Olivier Wevers Chalnessa Eames Ariana Lallone Jeffrey Stanton Waterbaby Bagatelles: Batkhurel Bold Carla Körbes Karel Cruz Carrie Imler Rachel Foster* Lucien Postlewaite Benjamin Griffiths I was most interested to see the second cast for "Afternoon Ball", and the trio will be danced by Benjamin Griffiths, Andrew Bartee, and Maria Chapman. When the ballet was first performed, Chapman was in the couple from the past with Jerome Tisserand; in this run we'll see her in the role danced by Kaori Nakamura and Chalnessa Eames in the first run, with Laura Gilbreath taking her original part in the same cast. The Saturday afternoon cast of "Waterbaby Bagatelles" is almost entirely new, and that will be interesting to see, too.

I'm closing this topic now.

I had never heard the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra play in its home theater, the Orpheum Theatre, before tonight. It's a very beautiful old theater in which I have seen a number of recitals and a concert version of "Pelleas et Melisande". (I'd heard members of the VSO play contemporary music at the Roundhouse.) I was surprised by the two video screens on either side of the stage in which there were close-ups of the orchestra players and conductor, and whoever planned the shots knew the music intimately and focused on all of the appropriate soloists. Between the opening work, the Beethoven "Coriolan Overture", and the soloist piece, Schumann's Violin Concerto in D minor, while the orchestra was onstage, a taped interview between the conductor, Guenther Herbig, and the violinist, Dale Barltrop, played onscreen. They explained how Schumann's family, backed by Joachim, the violinist for whom the work was created, decided that it reflected Schumann's failing mental state, and that it should be suppressed, which it was for 80 years, and it was first performed in public in 1937. We didn't need to hear Barltrop talk about his personal commitment to the work: it was evident from his inspired playing. I'm not a big Schumann fan, apart from a few songs and some piano music, and I found the first movement dull, but the second was lovely and the third soared. Hearing the Beethoven and Schumann, I think that it's partially the hall's acoustics that makes the sound quite rich. The upside is the beautiful blending of the woodwinds and brass. The downside is that the violins tended to get lost in their medium to lower register in the smaller orchestra size. I have a "make your own" subscription, and the selling point on the program was Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10. Waves and waves and walls of sound came from the orchestra, with brilliant playing by flute, piccolo, bassoon, French horn, English horn, oboe, and clarinet soloists, and the the entire brass and percussion sections. Most remarkable was the way the orchestra went from full tilt, like a rushing train to stopping on a dime, and they did this multiple times throughout the symphony.

One of the reasons why Mahler can be so polarizing is the influence he had on Schoenberg and, as a result, Schoenberg's pupils, Berg and Webern. To some Schoenberg was the end of music, and Mahler, as the teacher, was to blame. Those on the other end of Schoenberg's legacy thought he was a coward who would not give up tonality or institutional music. He also managed to become polarizing in New York in his last decade, as he was pretty much pushed out of heading the Metropolitan Opera in favor of Toscanini and moved to the New York Philharmonic before contracting his final illness. I disagree with Lebrecht that Mahler was somehow predictive, or any more predictive than many of the artists and writers of turn-of-the-century Vienna, who saw the disintegration of society, neurosis, and anxiety before them. Despite this he was a romantic figure to some. I remember meeting a man in his early 20's during a summer in Europe as a student, and we started to talk about classical music. He told me that he idolized Mahler, and when he found out I was heading to Vienna, he gave me $10 -- not peanuts in 1977 -- and asked me to put flowers on Mahler's grave at Grinzing, which was quite a trek using public transportation, at least then, but his precise directions on how to find the grave were impeccable. The gravestone is quite beautiful. I wouldn't have wanted to know him, though, given the awful way he treated Alma Mahler, who has had a bad rap, most recently from Tom Lehrer.

To answer the title, many, if not most, great authors needed an editor. I think how the revelation will affect her reputation among those who are aware of it will depend on what they find most valuable about her. Those who love the style will be disappointed that it was her editor's to a large degree. I'm not, because it's the characterizations and the description of social mores and restrictions that are important to me. I'd love to read the originals, because I'm intrigued by the idea that she was experimental, especially the original of "Persuasion".

Lucia's got nothing on the last scene of the Met Opera's "Boris Godunov", where the make-up department went wild with the beaten up boyars. They even did dried blood to indicate multiple beatings, and the slit throat affects were not for the faint of heart, especially with the camera up-close-and-personal.

Here is a link to the excerpt from Homans' new book, "Apollo's Angels" which was published in "The New Republic": Is Ballet Over? and listed in 13 October Links, thanks to a heads up from Kathleen O'Connell. Homans writes, What is not surprising is that dances have a short half-life because the majority don't have a score like music does and the lost scores of a student Bizet, for example, don't exist for the 21 ballets Balanchine choreographed for the Young Ballet, nearly 5% of Balanchine's output. That doesn't count the 35 or so dances he created for resorts, cabarets, and commissions he created before he had a company of his own or the 18 more in the second 200+ works he created (~ on eighth of his output). Presumably the work he did for 5 films and 7 TV shows are preserved in some form, if not generally available, but for the works he did for musical comedy (16, almost 4%), incidental divertissements for plays, primarily the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford (10, 2%), and especially the operas -- 112, or 26%, of which only one directly spawned a ballet ("Orfeo ed Euridice"/"Chaconne") and two indirectly may have influenced another ("Faust"/"Walpurgisnacht", "Don Carlos"/"Ballo della Regina") -- were in forms never intended to be repeated or revived. Looking at the ballets, and removing the stagings and small alterations and the re-workings, about half of the (somewhat) final versions are preserved and in the active repertoire.

It's possible that Phillip Otto, who I believe was Prince as an SAB student, was onstage in a "Nutcracker" with his two older brothers either in as corps members or advanced students, but with the hoards in "Nutcracker", it's impossible to avoid casting siblings together, especially towards the end of the run where the non-wounded are at a premium. He also had at least one sister in the same general age range. The two youngest were much younger than their siblings,

John Estacio's (music) and John Murrell's (libretto) new opera "Lillian Alling" had its world premiere last Saturday, and I was very lucky to have seen the second performance tonight. Almost entirely in the lyric tradition, it has an edge-of-the-seat story and a structure that teases and draws it out, plus it's been given a brilliant physical production and direction. What's impressive about the score is that it doesn't try to impress the audience with the composer's encyclopedic knowledge of two centuries of musical style all in one work. The center of the set by Sue LePage is a raised triangular wedge with a wide screen behind it for projections. Below it are doors from which a yellow pickup truck rolls out on stage from under the wedge or recedes back under. On either side is another platform with a narrower screen. Descending from the wedge are two sets of stairs of irregular shapes and size curving around like parentheses. These are on wheels, and are moved in and out simply and quickly. Under the wider stairs are the frames of indoor spaces. The story is structured around a feisty, wry elderly woman, Irene, sung and acted by Judith Forst, who has lived and raised her son, Jimmy, in a cabin in the BC wilderness -- the boy's father died when he was too young to remember his father -- and is now being driven to an assisted care facility in Vancouver by her son; she shows her unhappiness at this turn of events with a wicked sense of humor. In a last pass through the cabin for anything he hasn't packed into the truck, Jimmy finds a box with a perpetual motion top in it, and Irene starts to tell him the story of a woman, Lillian Alling, whom she met briefly and who had given her the top. The opera then alternates between Irene's conversations with Jimmy and the historical action. Alling is a Russian immigrant to North America, in search of the family friend, Jozef, who arranged for her exit papers. She is fierce, fearless, and determined to find Jozef, and after entering the US through Ellis Island, she follows his journey to North Dakota and then a mining town in British Columbia, mostly on foot and almost entirely alone, always thinking about the future and her goal. At first Jimmy's not really interested, but he humors his mother during the 4-5 hour drive, and he becomes more and more interested, especially after Irene reveals that his father knew and was involved with Alling. The use of projections is superb, always giving a great sense of place without overwhelming the stage action. There is beautiful footage of BC forest and a great sequence where Alling climbs dangerous rock formations and over some pretty shaky bridges to search for Jozef in the mining town. The most stunning, though, are shots of Stanley Park during a scene where Alling and Jimmy's father have a picnic on one of the curving step platforms, while families enjoy their picnics on the upper platforms. It's the place where Alling tells Jimmy's father the story of her past, and it's a stark contrast between the placid beauty of the park and her harrowing tale. There are two acts over an hour apiece, yet director Kelly Robinson kept the stage action moving, blending from scene to scene. There's only one real stop in the music, after a duet in Act II. Estacio's and Murrell's structure kept the tension between Irene's narrative and her conversations with Jimmy and the historical action. I think if 20-30 minutes were cut from it -- mainly to keep it contemporary musical length -- and a chamber version of an amplified orchestra and chorus, it could adapted for Broadway. (I suspect two of those cuts would be the "It never stops raining" and "We're ecstatic because the sun is out" choruses, which don't have the same resonance outside the Pacific Northwest.) It is alternately intense, witty, dramatic, tragic, and light. In short, it is a real weeper and a great triumph. It would be a real shame if these four performances were it.* While I thought Act I of "Moby Dick" was superb, "Lillian Alling" is the best new opera I've ever seen. I just bought aother ticket for Saturday. Edited to add: I just read in "Crosscut" that this is a co-production with Banff, and the opera will be presented there this summer.

Michael Popkin reviews Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch at BAM and Batsheva Dance Company at the Joyce for danceviewtimes.

It's been quite a weekend at Seattle Opera with the opening performances of "Lucia di Lammermoor" with two different principal casts. Both Lucias, Aleksandra Kurzak and Davinia Rodriguez made their debuts in the title role and Ms. Rodriguez made her American debut as well; the production is also the first Edgardo for William Burden, while Scott Piper sang the role in Cleveland for director Tomer Zvulun. If this is where Kurzak, Rodrigues, and Burden are starting, I can't even imagine what their performances will be like with a few more productions under their belts or even by the end of the run two weeks from now. The pairings themselves were interesting, with vocal temperamental contrasts. There was more intensity in Kurzak's voice than Rodriguez', her moods had more swing, and her mad scene was truly mad. Kurzak once wanted to be a ballerina; ballerinas could learn a few things from Kurzak for their Giselles. While Burden's voice is one of the most beautiful I've heard live, he doesn't have the inherently big dramatic sound that Scott Piper, Rodriguez' Edgardo, does, and to create the drama he used a wider range of dynamics vocally and through his acting. Listening to and watching Piper, I kept thinking of Manrico. Kurzak had some spine-tingling trills and the full gamut of coloratura tools, and she took down the roof. Her technique was so solid that I could imagine waking her up in the middle of the night and asking her to sing high E, and she would do it. Her top notes, though, had a different quality than the rest of her voice, very laser-like. Rodriguez's sounded fuller and more integrated with the rest of her voice. She had a sweeter, lighter sound overall, but yet with plenty of emotion and sensuality, and that was in contrast to Piper's direct, dramatic, Italianate sound. Both Enricos, Ljubomir Puskaric and Philip Cutlip had warm and open tops -- Puskaric's top was particularly beautiful -- but sounded weaker in the bottom of their ranges. I heard Cutlip sing Handel a few years ago in Dallas back in the Music Fair barn with horrific acoustics, and he sounded less agile today, but in the Handel his character was more wicked, while as Enrico he had a bigger dramatic challenge. It didn't help either that Enrico is about as unsympathetic a character as they come, and that's saying a lot for baritones: he's not smart enough to be charismatically evil, and there's neither bad-boy appeal nor room for much sympathy, even when he's worried that he's a dead man if Lucia's marriage to Arturo doesn't work out. It doesn't help that he seems somewhat contrite in the Sextet, but then his first reaction to the clearly mad Lucia is to attack her as a murderer. It also didn't help that Arthur Woodley's Raimondo, the only other deep voice, nearly stole the show, his rich voice carrying clearly to the back of the house. Raimondo also gets sympathy points as a character, but then, for me at least, loses them again in the scene right after the mad scene, one that is usually cut, in which he blames the entire tragedy on Normanno as if Normanno were Iago. Not that I think Normanno a great guy -- he's the one who intercepts Lucia's letters to Edgardo and forges one that claims that Edgardo has fallen in love with a French woman -- but, please: whether he's seen as a snake or loyal to the family, he does Enrico's dirty work (that Enrico is too dumb to figure out) with Enrico's full blessing, and this whole mess happens because of Enrico's agenda. Raimondo, a member of the family, hypocritically blames the outsider and places none on his nephew, and that's after he convinces Lucia to marry Arturo. The chorus was superb throughout and was instrumental in helping to make the Sextet through the end of the second act throat-grabbing. Three former Seattle Opera Young Artists were in the production in smaller parts, and they all did very fine work: Lindsey Anderson as Alisa, Andrew Stenson as Arturo, and Eric Neuville as Normanno. Neuville sounded strongest from the Second Tier, and he was very impressive dramatically. Tomer Zvulun's direction was wonderfully paced, and his ideas to use the ghost of Lucia throughout the opera were very effective, particularly when the singer who plays Lucia appears as the Ghost of Lucia in the final scene. I loved how Lucia slits each wrist and arm in the mad scene. Having Edgardo and Lucia meet during the short orchestral opening was a very fine touch and set up the drama from the outset. The one scene that didn't work was Edgardo's entrance just before the Sextet, in which he aims a pistol at Enrico and a good number of Enrico's family then pull their guns on Edgardo. It was too similar to the classic scene in the movies where someone pulls a gun, and then you hear "click" "click" "click" "click" "click", and suddenly the camera pans out, everyone's pointing guns at each other, and no one can move. The audience giggled in both performances at this scene, and I don't think that's what Zvulun intended. It was to the performers' great credit that they re-focused the scene through the emotional intensity of their singing. I would also lose the snow in the final scene. It looks beautiful, but I could only think of the tenors singing their hearts out with pieces of fake snow floating around, not to mention the amount of dust that must be stirred up as it drops. The costumes were generally beautiful and avoided a parade of tartans. I particularly liked the dress Lucia wore for the marriage contract scene. I wish Edgardo's light blue-grey jacket were replaced, though: it looks off the rack, and each Edgardo looked like he'd lost 40 lbs. in his next costume. (The food in France couldn't have been that bad.) Thanks to Robert Wierzel's lighting design, the scenes with the ghosts were eerily effective. In the confrontation scene between Enrico and Lucia the lighting cast huge shadows, which made Enrico even more menacing. "Lucia" is not among my favorite operas -- the last time I saw it was in the early '80's -- but if I were still living in Seattle, I'd see each cast again. Both were great nights at the theater.

If anyone's in Vancouver (BC) this weekend, "Snow White" is one of the VIFF repeat films playing at the Vancity Theatre this weekend, on Sunday (17 Oct) at 4pm.

I've only seen Heather Watts do the role, from 1983-1985 with Bart Cook, and then from 1987-1992 with Jock Soto. I liked her unique anti-vulnerability: she wasn't a warrior, rather no matter how her partner pushed, stretched, and tied her into knots, she'd bounce back to her original form.

In my opinion, there are a number of muck-ups around PM's in this version of the software. I don't understand why PM's, or as they call them "Personal Conversations", are buried in a drop-down box invoked by clicking the tiny down arrow next to the user name, along with links to "My Profile", "My Settings", "My Content" (aka "View New Content"), etc. I was able to add a link to "Personal Messenger" at the top of the page, between "Contact Us" and "Ballet Talk for Dancers". I hope this helps a little to make Personal Messenger more visible. There aren't any bells and whistles, like conditional logic to not display the link for guests and members who don't have enough posts to use the feature; clicking the link if you're not signed in or don't have PM privileges should result in an error message.

The comment about singers with great potential disappearing isn't that unusual in the opera world. There seemed to be an epidemic of it in the '80's and '90's, and it was often blamed on airline commuting, a generation that had grown up with with little rest between shorter and shorter engagements. 20 years ago, I think it had less to do with technique than with taking on the wrong rep and maybe the change from apprenticeships in small rep houses in Europe to conservatory training and piecing together a free-lance career. More recently, with an emphasis on physical appearance, there are singers who seemed strained by the demands of the bigger houses where they are now employed. Peter Gelb is accused of this constantly, but I thought it was very interesting that in "The Audition", the judging panel was looking for the big voices rather than the finished ones, and the judges called tiny Kiera Duffy's voice one for houses in Europe. Sutherland may have sung often out of the Important House route, but particularly in the US, those houses aren't often small like the ones in Europe. Until last year, for example, singers in Dallas had to sing in the barn at the state fair grounds, with horrific acoustics, where even Ruth Anne Swenson occasionally sounded like the door was closed mid aria, and she was on the other side of the door. Marilyn Horne spoke about Sutherland during one of the Sirius intermission features during last night's broadcast of the first performance of the new "Boris Godunov". Her voice was close to tears many times as she described their working relationship and their personal friendship, and it was very generous of her to speak so soon after Sutherland's death.

In Seattle they sent the Rhein Daughters an exercise kit and an exercise plan for a full year in advance.

A short note from Anthony Tomassini in The New York Tiems: Joan Sutherland, ‘Stupendous’ Soprano, Dies at 83