Quiggin

Juliana Devaan seems to pit Balanchine's brittle Modernism (but also Cunningham's and Tricia Brown's non-narrative modernism) against Martha Graham's more natural and egalitarian story-telling dance model. Most of Devaan's piece, however, is taken up with the case against the "Balanchine industry," a "culture industry" (Adorno v. Balanchine?) which has kept down a natural form of dance expression in America. Balanchine among many other things is faulted for his hyper patriotism, made explicit in Stars & Stripes – "The piece featured groups of dancers, called “regiments” performing “campaigns” to brass, militaristic music, as well as a pas de deux inspired by Dwight Eisenhower’s romance" – and his "legacy of misogyny, sexual misconduct, and expectations of extreme thinness." The case Devaan wants to make, but holds back until the last paragraph, is for a more natural way of being in the world that a Graham inspired kind of dance could have led us to: But she doesn't expand on that potentially interesting idea, explain what source material it would be, and how it would work. And Devaan neglects to set 1950s ballet in the context, or field, of the Cold War when ballet and Modernism provided a kind of cultural capital that could be used between/against adversaries. Also the huge gravitational pull that Modernism held in parallel in all the arts, in painting (ab ex & Minimalism), music (Stockhausen & Scodanibbio) and in films (J-L Godard). Much of the anti-Balanchine criticism could also be leveled against Mies van der Rohe. Both Balanchine and Mies had important careers abroad and in America, both participated in important early 20th century avant garde movements (Mies headed the Bauhaus), both established important schools in America, and both were accused of making art that was cold and inhuman as a result of its great clarity of form and that stifled competition in their respective fields. Also ironically, during the period of Balanchine's anti-Soviet, "Eisenhower romance," Balanchine was building "American" ballets out of the principles of Soviet Constructivist dance that he had picked up during the pre-1924 days of heady experiment in post-revolution Russia (The Four Temperaments, Paul Taylor's solo in Episodes, Agon, Symphony in Three Movements). (all my pet hobby horses, though not in a well-organized row!) Am re-posting dirac's redirect to our discussion on Sarah Kaufman's similar anti-Balanchine argument, with good comments by volcanohunter, Helene, Kathleen O'Connell and others. Fell influence of Balanchine discussion Q: What would a Graham influenced dance world look like today?

Just for a note of clarification, dance "videos" come in three flavors: Film (all periods), Kinoscope (1945 to 1960), and Videotape (after 1958). Film is contrastier and has a classic tonality, Kinoscope, which was filmed directly off of a live tv monitor, comes with artifacts of band lines and highlights surrounded with black halos, and videotape seems both flat & shiny looking in tonality (like velour?), at least in the early days. Anyway after following the discussion above, I enjoyed watching this videotape of Alexander Godunov and Natalia Makarova. Godunov does seem to have a presence and charm that's quite different from Barysnikov's. I can see from this and other recordings why Nureyev was his model.

Yes. I believe Nicholas Hyter helped Christopher Wheeldon with the structure of one of his story ballets. And Boris Kochno wrote the librettos for many of Diaghilev's later works, – La Chatte, The Gods go a-Begging and Prodigal Son (and later, Cotillon), and Cocteau provided the outline for Parade. Regarding Gatsby, 1920s jazz might be difficult to set dance to if you think of the insistent beat of the works of Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and Bix Beiderbecke (Way Down Yonder in New Orleans). Also doesn't The Great Gatsby depend primarily on the economy of Fitzgerald's prose?

Yes! And the men sometimes lift and hold the women over their heads and move them about like lawn furniture. ("Before the Rain"?) Always enjoy watching clips of Pam Tanowitz's choreography, especially when Zachary Gonder is in the group.

Interview with Vladimir Jurowski in The Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/classical-music/vladimir-jurowski-composer-interview-royal-festival-hall/

Interesting how the standard curtain time has drifted over the years. Up until the seventies it was 8:30 (Noel Coward has a play titled "Tonight at 8:30"). And a 1926 issue of Drama Calendar lists varying curtain times of 8:15, 8:35, 8:45,& 9:00 for theater events (apparently there were no stand-alone ballet performances then). I'm always running late, so when i lived in New York – at Bowery & Houston, a whole world away from NY State Theater – I really appreciated the 8:00 curtain .

Liszt called his faux-Romani borrowings Hungarian Rhapsodies. Ravel borrowed from this and also from the Romani musical arrangements he heard the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi play. There are dozens of opera and classical music pieces from the 18th and 19th centuries with variations of Zingara, Zigeuner, alla Zingarese (Brahms) in the title. Ravel's seem to be the last of the line.

Balanchine's Schubert L'Errante/Errante is often referred to in ballet literature, most recently in Lynn Garafola's La Nijinska. Croce, for instance, says that the veil between earth and underworld in Orpheus is derived from Tchelitchev's decor in Errante (see NinaFan's V&A link above). Ballets 1933, the program in which Errante appeared, was an important way station on Balanchine's choreographic journey. Changing Tzigane to Errante messes with the history. (Am currently reading Grigoriev's Ballets Russes memoir and see that Diaghilev changed Chopiniana, which he didn't like, to Les Sylphides over Fokine's objections. Later in a kind of reversal, he changed Le Astuzie Femminili to Cimarosiana after its composer.)

Another master gone. Someone whose work strikes a strong note that helps guide you. Serra was part of a group that came on the scene in the mid sixties that included Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, Joan Jonas, and Philip Glass. His prop / leaning pieces were inspired by Judson Church dance works of Yvonne Ranier, Trisha Brown and Simone Forti – especially Brown's "Leaning Duet," with its "applied equilibrium."

I once heard Maurizio Pollini do a crazy program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles – the Diabelli Variations of Beethoven, an intense world of their own, and Stockhausen's Klavierstück X, for which Pollini came out in shirtsleeves, which allowed him to play at times with arms and fists. A few people left for the second half but there was lots of pretty passionate applause at the end, enough that he played Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces for an encore. Pollini's father, Gino Pollini, was an architect and member of the Italian Rationalists – a great, slightly underappreciated modernist movement which had a kind of Diabelli-like rigor to it. All part of a disappearing world.

The musicians of the San Francisco Symphony have issued a statement asking the Board of Governors to retain Esa-Pekka Salonen as conductor and restore programs such as the popular SoundBox series. https://operawire.com/san-francisco-symphony-musicians-release-statement-regarding-esa-pekka-salonens-departure/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/sf-symphony-salonen-19265363.php

Yes, but in San Francisco, the serious stuff seems a bit out of balance with film nights. (An odd sort of concert hall music experience since film music is designed to cue the viewer as what they should feel about what's on the screen. In themselves, they're a little like "music-minus-one" albums.) The Los Angeles Philharmonic, ironically, seems to feel less obligated to program film score evenings: https://www.laphil.com/events/performances?Venue=LA+Phil&Season=null https://www.sfsymphony.org/Calendar

I was saddened to learn that Esa-Pekka Salonen is leaving San Francisco next year, in part because I haven't regularly attended performances of SFS in the past couple of years. I really liked his Debussy and Stravinsky performances which had such great clarity and detail. Salonen is leaving due to disagreements about allocation of resources. Also maybe (my speculation) because of the way the calendar is padded out with lots of film score programs: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Gladiator. He also chose to do programs like the one coming up on June 13: Cello Concerto No. 1 Dmitri Shostakovich Fairytale Poem [First San Francisco Symphony Performances] Sofia Gubaidulina Francesca da Rimini Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/arts/music/esa-pekka-salonen-leaving-san-francisco-symphony.html

Alexey Brodovitch perhaps owes the command "Astonish Me" to Diaghilev, for whom he worked at set painting for a while, but so many photographers owe their film sense to Brodovitch himself. Irving Penn, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Lillian Bassman, Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, Leon Levenstein, Louis Fauer, and Hiro all worked with Brodovitch or took intense* classes from him. Harper's Bazaar in its 15 September 1940 issue describes him thus: "Alexey Brodovitch, the Bazaar’s art director, is Russian, and a man of iron shyness, with a gift like the Cheshire cat’s of fading in and out of this office of madly leaping females." From what I've seen of the catalogue, it looks as if Gary Winogrand's insightful 1950s photos of first night Met opera goers are included in the Barnes show, as most likely are Brodovitch's own long-shutter speed photographs of ballet performances of the late thirties, such as Balanchine's Cotillon and Massine's Seventh Symphony. https://www.barnesfoundation.org/brodovitch-astonish-me https://lapetitemelancolie.net/2015/08/05/alexey-brodovitch-ballet-1935-37/ * "exacting and ruthless": Bazaar in 1954

Yes, as I remember it, it was Jackie Kennedy who helped with the Chanel revival, at least in the US. Incidentally, Christian Bérard, who influenced and guided Dior through the initial stages of the New Look, also provided the look for the original versions of Balanchine's La Valse and Mozartiana – traces of which still linger in the choreography. Cocteau interestingly in Harper's: "the fashions created by Mademoiselle Chanel have never been extravagant ... In a way that is uniquely her own she imposes the invisible. In the midst of the social uproar, the nobility of a silence."

Thanks Drew. Interesting reading your thoughts on the Coco Chanel ballet and the ebbs and flows of its narrative. Wonder if a "shadow" Onegin – or shadow Pushkin character – would help bring that ballet closer to the original novel/poem. I'm wondering about the Chanel dream of ripping up Dior's dresses. Looking through the images in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar of the forties and fifties online, it doesn't seem as if Chanel's designs would hold up very well against Christian Dior's brilliant work, especially the sleek designs of his 1947 and 1951 collections. In fact Chanel seems to completely disappear from the scene until 1955 when Jean Cocteau of all people tries to rehabilitate her in a 1955 Bazaar article, and she doesn't seem to be much of a player even after that. Also Dior, always described as a shy and self-effacing man, seems an odd nemesis to have been picked for Chanel. Dior quietly continued to design during the war, while his sister Catherine worked for the Resistance out of their apartment and was later captured and tortured by the Gestapo. The comparison with Dior only seems to point up Chanel's dubious behavior during those years.

It may not have been the intention, but it looked non-binary/male to me. But I should have said more directly that I didn't think the casting worked.

I think the "he" is the part Stanley is dancing in "Racing" and as accommodating as Stanley is, the two of them seem to be in different ballets. Unfortunately, art depends on dialectics and binaries where two different ideas impact each other. it doesn't have to be male and female but it has to be two oppositional forces and those don't seem to have been worked out here. .

I'm just finishing "The Magician" after reading "The Master" – the kind of titling "Maestro" may have been trying to follow. In both books Colm Tóibín handles complex gay/straight, family/out of bounds relationships with great tact – so it's not impossible to do. What the movie does is lock Leonard Bernstein into a certain set of restricted ideas, very comfortable ones, that will be associated with him from now on. And clips of Bradley Cooper's Bernstein will likely supersede the real thing. Sidebar: In "the Magician" – about the Thomas Mann family – there are some very funny scenes that kind of criss-cross "Maestro." One is about Alma Mahler trying to sell the original copy of the Bruckner Third to Adolf Hitler and another alludes to Erika Mann's affair with Bruno Walter, who is insufferably boastful. Plus there's a great impersonation of Virginia Woolf by W H Auden. Am looking forward to the Schoenberg/"Dr Faustus" pages.

Saw his Melancholic several times in San Francisco. The best – beautifully sustained, completely in character of a kind of stripped down non-character.

Mark Swed in the LA Times has some good notes on the movie, the first echoing abatt's reservations about the depiction of Bernstein's conducting style: And on the significance of Thomas Cothran in Bernstein's life: Here's Swed's whole Los Angeles Times piece about the "missing essence" of the Netflix pic: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-12-22/netflix-maestro-movie-leonard-bernstein And his link to a longer account of the Bernstein/Cothran relationship by Peter Napolitano in the Huffington Post: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leonard-bernstein-maestro-tommy-cothran_n_65776e50e4b09724b4352994 Yes, a multi-season series might be the thing, but with all the material available, musical and biographical, it could well be an unlimited one. A whole season could be devoted to the making of Candide, with Lilian Hellman, Richard Wilbur, Barbara Cook, Voltaire, etc !

Henri Cartier-Bresson, who took the series of pictures, famously did not allow his photos to be cropped (except for Alexei Brodovitch, editor of Harper's Bazaar, to whom he allowed the privilege). He believed in catching the whole thing in one throw. H C-B: Lincoln Kirstein: HIs approach was a huge influence on post war Amercian photographers such as Gary Winogrand, William Eggleston and Nan Goldin. No, the picture should not have been cropped. Added: I'll have to amend my comment to say that I'm not sure if the Arthur Mitchell photo was part of the series taken by Cartier-Bresson (there's no vignetting at corners of frame from the particular Leica lens H C-B used), though his ideas of cropping could still apply.

Not all of the archive at NYRB seems to be in public access though you can register for one (or two) free looks. Public libraries, such as San Francisco's, may have online subscriptions through Flipster, but only to 2014. I enjoyed reading Joan Acocella's reviews, though there seemed to me to be some sadness along with the sharpness. Here's a clip from a 1995 article on another critic, Robert Garis: The New York Times obit mentions that a collection of AC's writings on literature, “The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays,” will be published later in the year.

Really enjoyed it the second time, after a quick run through. So many Tchaikovsky overtures and fantasies, like pie fillings without the crust, one after another, often dark and dense – a bit overwhelming. I especially liked the Elegy at the beginning where the corps seem to be describing the dancer's thoughts (Shane Wagman?). Nice that Romeo & Juliet began with the ending first, freeing up the rest of the ballet.

The "Funeral march" is ironic and has some dances in it and odd changes of tempi, so it would seem to give Ratmansky some room to play in. The Adagietto is what people who don't like Mahler like, and I never look forward to it. Klaus Tennstedt said something like it was a bit too sweet perhaps, but it gives the audience a moment to "elax" a bit. But as main fare?