Quiggin

A bit of a tongue-twister

Thought I would slip this in. Nice tutorial on Coppélia with Judith Fugate when it was done in San Francisco. Wonderful production and four great casts, three of which appear in this clip.

Yes, Kyra Nichols in Mozartiana ! I saw her do in it several years apart at City Ballet, slightly differently. She said at an interview here in SF, at a Balanchine centennial event, that when she inherited a Suzanne Farrell role (perhaps it was Mozartiana she was referring to), she would strip it back to what she thought was its basis and start over again.

Kasmir Malevitch (Kazymyr Malevych) and Alexandria Exter are repatriated to Ukraine in a current Royal Academy exhibition. Lots to see here on these links (including Vadym Meller's "Masks" sketch for Nijinska's School of Movements). "Six Ukrainian Artists you should know:" https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/six-ukrainian-modernists-you-should-know "Visions from Ukraine," RA Magazine: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/ra-magazine-eye-of-the-storm "How Ukraine Refashioned Modernist Art," in Hyperallergenic https://hyperallergic.com/948128/how-ukraine-refashioned-modernist-art-royal-academy-london/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Amy Sherald%2C Getty Fireworks%2C US Elections&utm_campaign=W092124

A friend of mine attended a Bach recital in which the pianist – I think it was Piotr Anderszewski – apologized and redid a prelude because he thought he was off to a bad start. Often in a classical music program, the first piece is often a throw away. Richter does Haydn first sometimes before Debussy or Chopin to tune up before settling in. And with classical music there are natural repeats and variations and hidden clues where you can sort of get your bearings without too many people noticing. If a mistake happens in a cabaret or downtown venue, there's enough latitude to backtrack and (charmingly) correct and make it a part of the act. Ella Fitzgerald had to fudge the lyrics of "Mack the Knife" she was (re)introducing to a Berlin audience in the 1960s. In straight theater I don't mind people repeating something or fudging to get back on track – or a little stretch of improvisation, like Marlon Brando (and Allegra Kent?) used to do (which gives the performance an eerie depth). And aren't there ballets where mistakes dancers have made are later written into the choreography? And false endings (Emeralds) where the audience begins to clap and then is shocked to see there is more. Part of live theater is that at any minute there could be a mistake, a repeat would have to be made – and that it doesn't happen is part of the thrill.

Maybe the violin was used because it was closer to an orchestra sound (in miniature) than the percussive piano. And in cold studios it was easier to keep in tune, as Helene suggests above. I'm reading Prokofiev's "Diaries 1915-1923" and he often has to compose without a piano or try track down one, not always in tune. He seems to be very proficient in expansions and reductions of his own scores, such as "Chout" for Diaghilev. There's a nice long digression about the Partita #2 Chaconne in a recent novel by Greg Baxter, "The Apartment," a kind of auto fiction mostly consisting of everyday details of searching for an apartment in an unnamed European city. The narrator is buttonholed after a student recital he happens to wonder into, and his interlocutor goes on and on about the many voices Bach can pull out of such a simple instrument as a violin. '"Bach looked out across the landscape of music that had come before him and gathered it all up, every sound and every theme the ever existed, and to him they were bricks and wood and stones and glass, and he refined them into a musical cathedral that was unimaginable to anyone living in his age and unrepeatable to anyone after," said Schmetterling.' Nicolas Economou claimed that he managed to squeeze every Tchaikovsky note into his transcription of the "Nutcracker." Always chuckle when I listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA0ivU2we5M

I take it that Lopukhov's point was that previously all ballet music was considered to be "accompaniment," rather than on equal terms with the choreography, and could be cut and pasted as necessary. (Stravinsky apparently thought the opposite in his collaborations with Balanchine, until Agon.) But also that Petipa rehearsed with a severely reduced version of the original, so it would be difficult to match movement to various lines of musical development. Listening to the orchestral rehearsals would already be too late in the process, the structure had been set. Lopukhov, of course, is making points to promote his ideas of music and choreography being equals, but he was an eyewitness to some of this (b. 1886) or heard from others at the Mariinsky what had gone down. As I recall reading, Balanchine himself used reductions but they were sometimes ones he had done himself.

Fyodor Lopukhov (brother of Lydia Lopokova and, as choreographer, an influence on George Balanchine) has an interesting critique of Petipa's musicality in "The Ballet Master and the Score." The problem he says is two-fold. Prior to Tchaikovsky, ballet music was considered to be accompaniment to the choreography, not to work with it. Petipa, he implies, did not realize that Tchaikovsky's musical skills were of a considerably higher rank than those of Pugni or Minkus. "Ballet masters did not imagine that one day a composer would appear who was not subordinate to them but would work in conjunction with them, nor were they aware that the outrageous cuts they made, which deprived music of all its meaning, were quite unacceptable." And second, Petipa worked to a reduction of the score, played by a violin for melody with another as accompaniment and sometimes a piano. So he could not know what oboe would be doing at one moment, what the clarinet was doing at another. It was all conveyed on the single voice of a sole violin.

The Continental Baths – if that's the venue being referred to – was pretty famous in the 70s and open to a mixed crowd, a little in way the same group would check out some of the s&m clubs downtown in the 1980s. Bette Midler did a famous concert at the Continental Baths. Close friendships between straight people and gay people weren't career breakers then in New York.

Very much so. It was devised by Boris Kochno, who also wrote the libretto for the delightful The Gods Go a-Begging, which was also done the same year as Apollo (1928) and even more successful than Apollo in London where it had been quickly assembled on a whim of Diaghilev's. Balanchine did the choreography for both. The first Apollo, "the most Greek of the Greek gods," has many functions (purification, prophecy, care for young citizens, for poetry and music) and is "always young, beardless, and of harmonious beauty" (Oxford Classical Dictionary 1996). His body type seems to vary according to the era in which it is depicted. Michelangelo, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_(Michelangelo)#/media/File:Michelangelo,_apollino_01.jpg & https://explore.chicagocollections.org/image/uic/67/nk36z7g/ https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/fine-art-prints/Unbekannt/1207587/Archaic-Roman-relief-of-Apollo.html Wonderful clip of Gods reconstructed at Jacobs Pillow: Gods Go a-Begging

Wish I could see this, but there seems to be a good six minute survey of the show here: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/ballets-russes From the wall labels, it looks as if the focus is on the earlier days of the Ballets Russes and then moves from Diaghilev to the works of Nijinska and Ida Rubenstein. Wonder if any of Satie's or Prokofiev's scores are included. https://www.themorgan.org/sites/default/files/pdf/exhibitions/BalletsRussesLargePrintLabels.pdf

Of the Now: Premieres program, I liked watching Catherine Hurlin in Justin Peck's new work. Her long lines opened up figures that looked maybe a little too tight on other dancers. Wished I could have seen her in an extended clip of Faun. Also liked Pam Tanowitz's new work set to Schubert via Caroline Shaw, the overall structure and pared down vocabulary, the witty sequencings. Kind of looked like a further out variation of Lauren Lovette's variations on Apollo earlier in the program. Both used a similar configuration of dancers (though perhaps Tanowitz had Coppélia as Apollo). Nice seeing Cornejo in After Sorrow.

Thanks for the reports! Swerve/Duclos/Sylphide rehearsal: https://www.instagram.com/p/C9-0d6VyxFw/?hl=en

I would sometimes see apache dance numbers and references to it on variety shows, and it seems very likely Tharp would have too. There was an "I love Lucy" episode about it, and the musical "Can-Can" with Michael Kidd's choreography was revived in the 1980s. It seemed to be a way of shopping out domestic violence by setting it in the context of another, more exotic culture – the 1920s gangster world in France. It looks as if the Muppet episode is dealing with it at the tail end of its life span and turning it upside down. Just came across Anna Kisselgoff's July 1984 review of "Nine Sinatra Songs" saying "That's Life" was "choreographed and timed to Apache-dance perfection."

The Baryshnikov / Kudo "That's Life" looks like a French Apache dance, which were sometimes presented on early tv. Wonder if that was the starting point for Tharp. Looks much rougher on the woman's body that the man's, and he gets to shake her but she doesn't have much of a chance of a comeback. Not a great model of romance to put out in today's world.