Quiggin

Marcia B. Siegel kept a diary of her attandence to Stravinsky Festival – I just found my copy of Watching the Crowd Go By – which was sold out and difficult to get press passes to. She characterizes the women in white at the first part of Symphony in Three Movements as being launched in space and "pinned there for a minute in midflight". And like Paul, but a priori, she thinks the piece looks like Robbins works, especially in the "jazzy, athletic look of hip-thrusting walks with the opposite arm pushing out into space." "Violin Concerto is nicer, but I like it somewhat less," she says, and of Divertimento/Fée: "I feel I'm seeing steps I've never seen before, expecially in Tomasson's low, circling, eccentrically timed leaps." Duo Concertante is a great hit with the audience (many bows) but Monumentum/Movements she feels "is perhaps the greatest musical statement of the week." *** The Buckle review is not only programmatic madness but completely over the top in so many ways, even for the time. The war is now the Vietnam War, the pas is a brothel scene in Asia, the woman is "mother, sister, sweetheart, the girl next door" ... from whom "Madam will exact sixty percent." This surely must be a Monty Python sketch!

That's the movement that was originally written forset the "The Apparition of the Virgin" scene in the 1943 film Song of Bernadette, then recycled, according to Charles M. Joseph. Charlene Cohen said that Edward Villella referred to it as "the sanctuary," I guess in relation to the raucous outer movements. Yes, very beautiful despite being done in a sort of Morse or C++ computer code. It's amazing that Symphony in Three Movements and Violin Concerto premiered the same night at the Stravinsky Festival, June 18, 1970 [1972] – and Divertimento from Le Baiser de la Fee a few days later. rg, anyone else remember the overall effect at the time? [oops wrong year]

Paul, those parts do become muddled – as if Balanchine loaded up his brush with too much paint, and was attempting too much. After I saw another performance I thought that he might be folding different planes of action and having them move thorough each other. And in a pre-perpormance talk, Katita Waldo and Charlene Cohen, who had also danced the ballet with Miami and Villella, commented on the counts and how at one point there are 5 girls and 5 boys doing different set of counts at the same time, so if they're off slightly that might cause some more muddle. From what I remember of Glass Pieces, the movements and tempos seem crisper and more uniform, as does the music which is something of an extended arpeggio or monad – compared to Stravinsky's piece which divides against itself and in which the harp and piano are sometimes "duking it out" (to borrow a fight metaphor).

Yes, Symphony in Three Movements was definitely more programmatic than any other of Stravinsky's scores. According to Charles M. Joseph in Stravinsky and Balanchine, it did however begin life as film music for the "Apparition of the Virgin" scene in The Song of Bernandette. Balanchine, visiting Hollywood as it was being written, was "impressed by the jazzy score". But on the other hand, Balanchine, at least in his modernist works, tended to strip away all local references and for the dance just to be visual music. He may have thought of Symphony in the terms that Joseph outlines: I also remember one of the Joseph's ideas being that after Stravinsky's death, Balanchine felt he had a freer hand in setting choreography to Stravinsky's music. And that as of Agon, Balanchine was no longer was the junior member of the partnership.

It's an interesting and fruitful comparison, though I think of Symphony in Three Movements as a structure, or a series of structures, and Glass Pieces as a texture. Symphony in Three seemed to me to begin where The Four Temperaments ended, with the first pink dancer shuttled overhead through the Four Temperaments-like crowd. Arms in Symphony are likewise held in serifed "T"s but also in "W"s, which is the figure the push-up men on the floor end with. (Then there are the witty"X" cossings of arms in the pas.) I agree about the war vibe – it makes the ballet too programmatic to think of it in those terms, like the titles Beethoven's publishers sometimes gave his work.

There was no announcement and it was only during the bows of Symphony in Three Movements when all the cast members started pelting Vito Mazzeo with red roses and a bouquet or two were thrown at his feet from orchestra or first rows of the audience did you suspect something unusual was up. Then Helgi Tomasson came out to present him with a bouquet and it became official. At San Francisco Ballet Mazzeo danced McGregor Borderlands, Wheeldon Within the Golden Hour, and Ratmansky From Foreign Lands (often as the single vertical organizing element). He also danced Symphony in Three Movements with Yuan Yuan Tan, Plegmatic from The Four Temperaments, and the second movement of Symphony in C with Sofiane Sylve, all superbly. He says in a recent Twitter entry that he will dancing with the Dutch National Ballet next year.

Program Seven featured the last Balanchine piece San Francisco Ballet will do for a whole year – brilliantly, almost the best I've seen since my City Ballet-going days. It's almost as if the company wants to prove that they still can do Balanchine as well as anyone else, but for the time being they'd prefer not to. Symphony in Three Movements, set to Stravinsky's score, seems to begin where Four Temperaments leaves off, but much more cooly and a little unattractively, with hard movements and diagonals which then break up into subsidiary groups and ideas, accented and softened with brilliant cabrioles. At the end of the movement the diagonal reassembles and a shiver goes through it, like the movement of a caterpillar traveling along a twig. There follows a wonderful pas de deux of hinging and valve movements, hands turned flat to the audience, then turned perpendicular in a sort of basketweaving effect. There is the lifting of the woman overhead who holds a stiff sitting position, hands flat to her face, that could come out Wheeldon, and there is a lovely little inner pas of side-to-side neck movements. It's all done with great logic, clarity, a crisp vocabulary, and a unerring philosophy of spatial values. There are no arbitrary add-ons. Both casts were great but I especially enjoyed watching Carlos Quenedit (also excellent in Borderlands) who is a very effective Balanchine dancer – his trunk is very solid and tips forward and side to side nicely and he uses his arms beautifully and very intelligently. Vito Mazzeo was also great to watch in the first cast, crisp and clean and slightly bemused, but he is all long limbs and no trunk, so the effect is different. Lonnie Weeks and Clara Blanco were also austerely charming. Francesca da Rimini, by Yuri Possokhov, the second piece on the program, is an extended version of the pas from Romeo & Juliet with all hell boiling over from the get-go. The two lovers, who in Dante are so lightly carried by the wind, are here in the midst of a tempestuous affair and thrash out their feelings for each other. Three figures from Rodin’s Gates of Hell preside over the events in high Motown style. Francesca’s husband Giovanni, in the first cast Taras Domitro, is a smoldering-eyed street fighter from West Side Story, and after he kills Francesco and Paolo with an imaginary knife, is lassoed with three enormous tugboat ropes – each almost as big as he is – that haul him offstage. Maria Kochetkova and Joan Boada were brilliant with their material, especially so on first Thursday – their quick hand movements like flashing knives – and they received loud and enthusiastic ovations, of the sort usually reserved for Don Quixote. Criss-Cross by Helgi Tomasson is fun and playful, a little in the manner of Square Dance. There is a nice transition where the members of the first part pivot on the spot, like a suite of swinging doors, to reveal the cast of the second half of the ballet just behind their backs. The piece begins with sunny Scarlatti, then switches to stately Handel, but then Schoenberg takes over, xylophone notes float just overhead and there are little twitchy and twiggy sounds all along the perifery. It's somewhat like what goes on in Brahms-Schoenberg, and likewise a little too sweet and melodical. It was all beautifully played by the ballet orchestra, as was the astringent and endlessly inventive Stravinsky score. * Added Wednesday: Frances Chung and Carlos Quenedit in Francesca articulated the choreography with all sorts of fine details I hadn't seen before, in general opening it up and making it much more interesting. Chung developed more of a character than Kochetkova and Quenedit was more introspective than Boada and calmed down the character considerably. Now if only all the surrounding stagecraft, dry ice and ropes would quietly disappear ... And Maria Kochetkova was perfect in Criss-Cross, as if the part had been written for her; she filled out every corner of the choreography. Two distinguished ex-Balanchine dancers were in the audience, so it felt a little like the days of the B celebrations of 2005 or 2006.

Jonathan Winter added a further element of degree of unpredictability to early tv – you don't know where it's going and if it would go wrong. It also sometimes went on too long and you felt he didn't know how to end it, whereas someone like Lenny Bruce had definite break-off points to his improvisations. My aunt and uncle once shared a cab with Winters and were somewhat overwhelmed by his performance – he could never stop, never drop character they said.

Well, she's also scheduled to dance here in San Francisco tonight, the first piece, so maybe she's red-eyeing it to NY. MacGregor tomorrow and no jet lag?

I thought it was interesting that for a while Balanchine, like his father, wanted to become a composer rather than a choreographer and that for three years he studied musical theory and piano. Also that he was friends with the great Soviet conductor Evgeny Mryvinsky (who was working as an extra at the ballet) and that Balanchine even set a poem of Mravinsky’s to music. Balanchine’s ideas of choreography – music and visual space – seem to have been pretty mature by the time he left Russia in 1925, which was an amazingly great and fertile period of experimentalism in all the visual arts and in poetry and literature, in many ways eclipsing Paris and Germany. In Russia Balanchine seems to have been especially influenced by Fyodor Lopukhov's ideas on the relationship of music and choreography – that music should not be just a background for ballet steps. Lopukhov’s Writings on ballet and Music might be a helpful key to Balanchine's ideas, especially the essays, Dance Symphonism and The Position of Dance in Relation to Music: Separate, Dominant, Subordinate and Integrated. Here’s Lopukhov on the dynamics of La Bayadére (which could also be a description of a Balanchine work like Symphony in C): Balanchine’s relation to Sergei Eisenstein’s “visual musicality” I think is discussed in one of the Volkov’s books. Eliott Carter also has some interesting comments on Balanchine’s musicality in a couple of his ballet reviews in the late thirties (there's an interesting aside about changes in Apollo), and in a late interview in I Remember Balanchine.

Program Six: Raymonda, Act III – Nureyev / Glazunov Ibsen’s House – Caniparoli / Dvořák Symphonic Dances – Liang / Rachmaninov Program Seven: Criss-Cross – Tomasson / Scarlatti (Avison), Schoenberg after Handel Francesca da Rimini – Possokhov / Tchaikovsky Symphony in Three Movements – Balanchine / Stravinsky

And here's another piece, from Jesus Pastor – in which the gigue is turned inside out – a kind of executive summary of Mozartiana, and of late Balanchine. It begins at 2:14, but worth wading through R&J before that.

In my case off topic of the off-topic. But in the old days – I think Christiansen touches on this – opera singers may not have taken care of their voices as much as they should have. I remember Joan Sutherland cited as being especially careful in chosing what she sang – and how often she performed.

Probably truer of silent pictures. With sound, film often became radio, especially with MGM comedies – and with televison you can tell most of what's going only by checking the screen once in a while. I think the voice tends to trump the image. The quality, depth or lightness of the voice is always up for scrutiny, whether with opera singers or actors – their voices assure you who they are. I remember waking up to Kathleen Farrier's voice on the radio and thinking it sounded like rubies, that no other voice could possibly sound like that. I once worked in a small second hand record shop on a side street off Hollywood Boulevard – like the movie High Fidelity but for classical and jazz – where people dug in the bins for very special old recordings, as Birdsall mentions doing, to get closer and closer to the real thing. Do you have the Steuermann Carnaval or bootleg Caballe in Avignon or the Richter Debussy with the falling chair or Well Tempered with all the birds in the background? Once it was Mel Torme looking for an out of print Quartetto Italiano Schumann string quartet set. Anyway it surprised me when people began collecting videos of opera performances – a line of some sort had been crossed. Under the harsh eye of the camera (different than seeing actors on a stage), all of the mystery of opera seemed to go away.

Yes – I guess – Romeo & Juliet and Midsummer's Night Dream were successful ballets but derive from Ovid and an early Greek novella (as Dream did) and had cast-iron, almost generic, plots. Winter's Tale is much more subtle and mysterious – how do you transcribe it into mime and dance – it's all words, it'll fall apart. (And for me Onegin irons out the tone and all the contradictions of the original – Puskin's novel doesn't quite know if it wants to be a romantic story or a parody of one. It's as if they share the same original source, rather than the ballet being based on the novel.)

I wouldn't want to see The Winter's Tale as a ballet – it's such a perfect play. I'm afraid Wheedon is attracted to it so that Hermione can be carried around stage – as in The Unanswered Question. The best ballets seem to come from modest folk and fairy tales – Cinderella, Swan Lake, Nutcracker, Giselle, Coppelia, Petrouska – or from slight intellectual conceits such as Parade, Apollo or La Chatte. Rarely from masterpieces.

I’m glad you got to the ballet, pherank, I thought it was a good program. I agree with you about the Wheeldon piece (and the moving proscenium part), but a little less about Ratmansky and Balanchine. The three pas de deux of Within the Golden Hour had meaty parts for the dancers. In one the man walks between four quadrants that the woman makes while lying on the floor, and later he lets her fall forward, then pulls her back again (she’s posed like the statue on the front of a ship) as if he’s testing her tensile resistance. But the women often seem to be objects that the men want to do something with or to – here they’re carried overhead in stiff zig zag shapes (or like staple removers). And unlike Balanchine and Ratmansky, Wheeldon’s figures and shapes are overly plastic and ambiguous, so it becomes difficult to have them pun or rhyme with each other. From Foreign Lands begins at its most profound moment, in a prelude of pure silence before any music starts, as the men cue up in a circle and the women assemble behind them – and it ends with all of its characters forming a lovely rococo tableau. In between are some good divertissements and inventions, but the sweet, quickly too familiar music perhaps limits their scope. Yes, there is a place where the dancers slap the floor – two of the men do; could that have been part of a Russian traditional dance? The change of casts midweek (there was only single set of costumes which then had to be refitted for the second group of dancers) seemed to alter the tone of the ballet. So Sarah Van Patten’s sharp changes of mood became softer, almost questioning when Courtney Elizabeth took over the role. Scotch Symphony is a strange narrative – “brimming with implications” according to one of the first newspaper reviews. It begins in the encounter of a poet(?) and a sylph (whom the man can only touch – glance – with the back his hands) and ends with an engagement party or wedding in which everyone – even the bodyguards – participates. There are lots of beautiful upper body movements, rounded arms and sine-wave figures and quick reverses – all while the feet are involved in jigs, skips and flings. Now there are a series of turns-in-attitude for leads, then for corps and now the corps is a cemetery of crosses. The man does a beautiful set of rolling beats in obliquely canted half-turns to press his case to the sylph and her protectors. Multiple pas de chats of corps women are augmented with quick, loose-hinged ballones (like misprints or double Elvises). In one cast I liked Joan Boada, who really got into character, his face at first in shadow, then as if hit with light. Maria Kochetkova, his sylph, was lovely but she seemed too bright and cheery – perpetually happiness – for the changing shifts of narrative. Vanessa Zahorian and Taras Domitro seemed the best matched leads in tone, in their lines and finish, and ebb and flow.

Here's a good interview with Alexei Ratmansky about From Foreign Lands which is hidden somewhere in the handsome but often hopeless San Francisco Ballet website. Ratmansky talks about the music (selected at the last minute) and about how he set the choreography. There's a clip of the ballet in full dress towards the end, along with the beautiful ending tableau – which is held ever so briefly before the curtain comes down.

Here's the France 24 link that Natalia mentions – http://www.france24....o-filin-confess

Also "you refuse to become a deer or tree." There's a mention of Tanquil LeClercq in the footnote to Ronald Johnson's Ark 53: The Balanchine Spire: You can also hear Gerard Manley Hopkins in background of the Marianne Moore poem.

From Gold and Fitzdale’s tribute to Balanchine, which is a bit poetical: This recent tweet by Isaac Hernandez could be a prose poem about the dancer’s life:

The one of d'Amboise would make a great book cover or poster, lines and all. Looks like a Bauhaus- or Dutch school Leonardo man. Thanks for posting it.

Anthony Lane has a very funny review of the show at the New Yorker, with some nice lines on Shirley Bassey – though I think the shelf life of the piece is very short. http://www.newyorker...013-oscars.html In old days for comedians like Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and Billy Crystal there was Hollywood humor and Las Vegas humor – you had a separate set of jokes for each forum, and only occasionally used some of the raunchy Las Vegas stuff for "home viewers." Also there was "stag" humor which was just for men alone, but now is lovingly shared with a general audience. Seth McFarlane stuff gets by by being done in knowingly bad taste – he knows it's bad but compulsively repeats it, though not without a certain charm. But with our recent history of assassinations and assassination attempts – actual bullets going through heads – why didn't a hush fall over the audience at the "bad taste" Lincoln's head joke. And why is the Los Angeles Gay Men's chorus working with this guy?

Scotch Symphony – George Balanchine / Felix Mendelssohn From Foreign Lands – Alexi Ratmansky / Moritz Moszkowski Within the Golden Hour – Christopher Wheeldon / Ezio Bosso

Guide to Strange Places : Ashley Page / John Adams Beaux : Mark Morris / Bohuslav Martinuº The Rite of Spring : Yuri Possokhov / Igor Stravinsky Danse Sacrale – Pierre Monteux, original conductor, with San Francisco Symphony Orchestra