Quiggin

Dominque Delouche's "Violette and Mr B" -- which I just saw for the first time -- answers all the questions one may ever have about "Dances at a Gathering," as well as about "Emeralds" and "Liebeslieder Walzer." In the archival clips of Violette Verdy -- roughly filmed and slightly too fast -- you see how the parts were originally set down. All the performances since, at least the ones I've seen, seem to capture this aspect or that, but never everything at once and in one place.

Here's a nice rehearsal clip of Wendy Whelan and Gonzalo Garcia, dancers with oversized personalities, doing "Other Dances," which was also set to Chopin Mazurkas:

I saw Daniel Nagrin (whose works were included on the 92nd Street Y program) perform once in Los Angeles or Long Beach around 1980 -- and found his work quite charming and very intelligent and free. In one dance he stepped on and off of a log while he gave a monologue of sorts, and another focused on ballroom dancing and he talked how important it was for his generation, while he did different solo variations.

From the videotape of Moor's Pavane and Traitor (and one live viewing of the company in the 1980s), I would agree with Mr Macaulay that Jose Limon's work was overly schematic, the Traitor -- about the MacCarthy Hearings -- painfully so. On the other hand snippets of Limon's memoir and his observations on sleepy San Francisco and his travels to New York seem very nicely drawn.

William Kentridge's sets for 'the Nose' may be his best work -- and it seems to rank up there with David Hockney's theater work. I've linked a discussion page with the NYTimes arts critics, where you can also view a video of the sets and Kentridge talking about them. They look a little like the brilliant Russian experiments of the early twenties by Vertov in film, and the Constructivists on the stage -- but somehow also like Merce Cunningham's late work, and the way he was trying to relate the real dancers with the virtual, stick-figures he was creating (as if off knitting needles) to each other.

Roberta Smith -- who has been doing some fine reviewing lately, especially on the misguided New Museum show curated by Jeff Koons, and on alternate, non Blue Chip, real painting-painting -- has some interesting observations on set design. Note her evaluation of Per Kirkeby's sets for City Ballet.

SMITH:

From the visual side I found it thrilling that Kentridge activated the entire proscenium space, top to bottom, and that it remained active through the entire opera.

&

Kentridge’s “Nose” is slightly behind David Hockney’s frothy treatment of “A Rake’s Progress” (which was also done by the German artist Jörg Immendorff) and Kentridge’s own magical “Magic Flute.” It is quite a bit better than the Bill Viola video set for “Tristan,” at least as seen at Avery Fisher Hall in 2007, and it is miles ahead of the sets by the Danish painter Per Kirkeby for a recent restaging of “Romeo and Juliet” by New York City Ballet.

But I’d say the sky’s the limit in terms of future collaborations among visual and performing artists. For one thing, so many artists already work in multiple mediums, including music, or incorporate aspects of performance into their work. There’s already quite a bit of cross-fertilization. There is only going to be more.

'The Nose' and the Eye ...

I do seem to recall reading an interview with her where Balanchine told her she was one of the only one of his dancers who could act.

I think that Karin von Aroldingen in her interview in "I Remember Balanchine" (along with "Balanchine's Tchaikovsky," very essential reading) says Balanchine called her "the actress," which is different than acting -- more a potential and a characteristic. ... And, at least in clips, Lenya doesn't act, she seems to simply possess the stage.

This is an important program to see, I think, even a couple of times and with a couple of different casts. Petrushka is big and full of life, and you get to see the whole company, including students and future company dancers, a snapshot of the whole (“it’s the Nutcracker in a nutshell -- a bear, dancing Russians, and snow,” a friend commented) and you also see replicas of the vintage Benois sets.

With the Wednesday cast I was drawn to the acting between the Daniel Deivison-Oliveira as the Moor and Elizabeth Miner as the Ballerina, deliciously salacious and dry & poker-faced, but on Tuesday there was the brilliant counterpoint dancing of Brett Bauer and Clara Blanco in the same roles. Pascal Molat’s and Taras Domitro’s Petrushkas were both fine, Pascal’s perhaps a bit more to the quick.

And there is another Petrushka, it should be noted, who haunts the Opera House -- that of Pierre Monteux, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony for many years, 1935 to 1952 -- in the very same space -- who also conducted the premiere of Petrushka for Diaghilev in Paris in 1911. In Monteux’s Petrushka, which he recorded in the fifties, the rhythms are drier than Martin West’s, the piano faster and quirkier, and there is more inner detail and little strange emotional cul de sacs and arid melancholy, all of which help balance down the big crowd scenes with the small interior ones. And Monteux’s resolution of the drama stings -- salt in a wound -- more than San Francisco’s current version, all of which is probably much more lush and operatic than the original.

Yuri Possokhov’s Diving into the Lilacs seems clearer, and there is also maybe more diving, than last year’s version and there is lots of great dancing for everyone. Maria Kochetkova’s part seemed especially to be tailored around her endearing characteristics -- and my eye always catches Vitor Luiz with his beautifully transparent and articulate way of linking form to form.

In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated goes on forever, and you do want it to go on and on, but you lose your place in it -- or can only gauge your place by whether you hear dogs barking or other identifiable found-sounds in the background or not. In Tuesday’s cast Sofiane Sylve’s highly individual style seemed to help the piece find its way to, and shape, its finish. Garen Scribner and James Sofranko were especially fine, but everyone is dancing at such a high level you can let your eyes wander anywhere and not seem to miss anything.

I liked the end line of the piece:

One big secret of playing Chopin may simply be to remember that it's not as pretty as it sounds.

Like dirac, I like the Cortot recordings and his phrasings land on all the right spots, Ashkernazy less so -- the early Russian recordings were quite passionate -- beautiful shimmers of schools of notes -- but then he seemed to change when came to the west -- Patrick may have caught him in the transitional stage. Lipatti's take on the Walzes is simply delightful. A friend gave me bootlegged (do people still say that?) copies of Sofronitsky's performances (by way of Arlecchino), maybe an acquired taste, full hearted and variable. Bella Davidovitch said that they would wait anxiously to see what condition he would show up in, but that his playing, when it was on, was the most sublime of all.

Perhaps Wheeldon needs to find his own version of Lincoln Kirstein

But didn't Lourdes Lopez sort of serve as his Lincoln K? -- the company it seems was at least financially viable. Are there lines somewhere to be read between?

Vladimir Jurowski was the principal conductor of the Russian National Orchestra when it came to San Francisco two years or so ago and the sound was very elegant and maybe a bit dry. Jurowski is fascinating to watch conduct, his hands sometimes at his sides, his fingers making the most lean and precise moves, like a card player's.

But it was Evgeny Mravinsky -- sort of the Furtwangler of Russia, and at one time I believe briefly Balanchine's librettist -- who changed the way a lot of the friends I was influenced by thought about Tchaikovsky, who totally desyruped and detreaclized the 4, 5, and 6th. He brought out all the odd little wayward voices of oboes and violins, their differences of opinion, and banished the big waves of obvious emotion.

The French costume designer I knew at my community garden in Los Angeles (off Franklin Street of other threads) said that for her it was Klemperer, precise and dry to the point of sarcarsm sometimes, who opened her eyes to Tchaikovsky, that when she grew up in the twenties in Paris everyone made fun of him, even when years later in LA they were at the Vera Stravinsky's -- who was also a gardener, once greeting her with buckets of manure tea in hand -- they would have to be careful not make fun of Tchaikovsky because Igor Stravinsky would dart in every once and a while to hear what the "girls" were saying. For her, before Klemperer Tchaikovsky was a sitz bath, "only up to here," afterwards a total immersion of understanding.

The initial expectations were far too grand -- Wheeldon anticipated dancers leaving City Ballet to join his company and thought that the new company would perhaps be one of three in New York -- as you can see from the initial outline he described (below).

Lourdes Lopez's idea about using Morphoses as a curatorial company could be a great thing. One of her choices, Michael Clark, is a brilliant and very musical choreographer, at least in You Tube snippets. It's totally irreverential and disheveled stuff but underneath he has a fine almost classical sense of counterpoint and bringing dancers on and off stage.

from "Wheeldon Forms a Company" NYT, January 4, 2007, Daniel J. Wakin & Roslyn Sulcas.

Inevitably Mr. Wheeldon's company will compete for attention, donations and dancers, something Mr. Wheeldon indirectly acknowledged.

He said Mr. Martins gave his blessing, yet ''he understands also that this may mean some dancers will decide to come to me,'' Mr. Wheeldon said. ''That's just the way life is and the way things go.''

He continued, ''I'm sort of stepping into an area where people might think, 'Why does New York need another ballet company when we've already got two?' '' (In addition to City Ballet, New York is home to American Ballet Theater.) Answering his own question, he said, ''Maybe it doesn't, but I'm going to do it, and we'll see if I'm foolish or not.''

Mr. Wheeldon said he wanted to give dancers a greater voice, which is sometimes difficult in large companies like City Ballet. Referring to leaders of large companies in general, he said that casting decisions were not ''always handled in a perfectly sensitive way.''

''My mission is to create an environment that is collaborative in all respects,'' he said.

In an earlier recent interview he said he could make a ''change for the better in the ballet world'' by starting a company from scratch.

''I want to be in complete control of my personal artistic vision and goals,'' he said, ''and am not really interested in inheriting a legacy, but rather taking the opportunity to forge my own.'' Starting fresh also meant bypassing the ''big politics'' and bureaucracy of a large company, he said.

Program Three:

There is a little car made of two dancers that makes an appearance in the middle of Serenade. One of them, played by Vitor Luiz with a curiousity slightly reminiscent of Ib Andersen, is a blind or blind-folded poet (the original dancer for this role was very short sighted). The poet tells and becomes implicated in a story, and he strikes a series of unusual figures with the other dancers he comes across -- or who present themselves to him. He lingers and frames within his sweet concern the dancer who has fallen (and who perhaps is dreaming all this), while his chauffeur lingers over and and frames him within her concern. The poet also narrates a fragment piece about Apollo of Delos.

The story told, the poet leaves the dreamer, who may be his true love, and, blinded again, completes his journey across stage. Destiny, Balanchine has said, has other plans for him.

*

Sofiane Sylve dances the first pas of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto from inside out, feeling out all the corners, like a cat in a box. She dares move her hands at different rates and times -- they’re like the many little dials on an expensive Swiss watchface gone slightly mad -- and she now and then rolls a foot across the grain of the choreography as if turning a page. With the exception of the impossible backbends, you feel the part was written with an eye to her dancing it sometime in its long history.

*

When Theme and Variations was first performed, New York Times critic John Martin said, “it will probably never be necessary to again revive a Petipa ballet. Balanchine has achieved some truly marvelous three-voiced developments...It is the first ballet by this gifted choreographer which has compelled me to sit back and enjoy it with wholehearted delight.”

A little of the “enormous dash” of 1947 is missing, perhaps due to the complexity of the original dancing. Alicia Alonso says that her partner Igor Youskevitch asked for more, that he had nothing to do -- “I feel like I’m not dancing,” and Balanchine kept trying to make it more difficult and see where both of them would give up. “How do you let George do this to you,” Maria Tallchief said to Alonso.

On Wednesday night Lorena Feijoo and Vitor Luiz were a lovely couple and beautifully matched and they bought out many of the lovely figures of the ballet. But why was Lorena so intense? And where was the big effect of the male’s leap towards the audience? These restraints are cautioned against in the fine Balanchine Archive Interpreter’s video (which because of its sweetness and charm, has become the guide to this ballet for me).

In the video Mme Alonso says that parts of Theme & Variations are to be very flirtatious, others like running in the street, and jumping between puddles.

Alonso saw the role, as it was set on her, as a series of changing emotional weathers -- Lightly here Paloma she instructs: like a bird that wants to fly away, and at another place: semi-romantic; You are being woken from a strange and very beautiful dream ... Dance with your legs, like a smile, very delicate. Like a game with your head and top of body ... Now after a laugh, you’re getting serious ...

She gives a warning about the lateral lifts: Don’t lift her high, Corella, lift her only enough to fly -- the sensation you must give is only that she is so light -- there is not enough music here to lift her high.

And the forward jump: This is to the audience, Corella, the grand jete, not to Paloma; it’s a present you give the audience. Don’t leave your arms behind -- finish everything at once so the audience can take a snapshot.

I have quoted this at length because I’d love to see a cloud breaks of Alonso’s sunny vision in San Francisco’s coolish one.

*

Of the fine corps I’ve enjoyed watching Steven Morse and Diego Cruz -- their legwork is fast and clean and persuasive -- and it’s great to have Kristin Long back, as PeggyR notes -- she’ll be in Serenade once again on Friday night. Maria Kochetkova and the often miraculous Taras Domitro will be dancing Theme & Variations also on Friday night and princely Gennadi Nedvigin and debuting Frances Chung will be in on Sunday afternoon (as noted also above).

But San Francisco itself is too discreet and naturally reticent. An essay from Mademoiselle magazine in the early sixties, directed to “girls” thinking of moving here after college, noted that San Francisco was always comparing itself with New York, with the difference we do it all here but on a very human scale, slightly pleased with this answer. But when you asked for anything direct and special and explicit, you were told, a bit cooly, well, you'll have to go somewhere else for that.

What I notice about the Miami Company -- I've only seen them twice on tour here -- is the sharp finish and accents of the hands and feet so that the choreographic figures are more fully realized, whereas with San Francisco I think the emphasis is on a lovely finish of the hands -- at one time Leibesleider seemed to be an important influence on some of Helgi Tomasson's choreography (who has a great musical sensitivity), the way people would run off stage with one hand seemingly taking the dancer away.

I have enjoyed watching large personalities who seem to work character from inside out, a little dangerously: Tina LeBlanc, Gonzalo Garcia, Sofiane Sylve and Taras Domitro (Joan's Boada's sensitive musicality was important too). They can expand and contract the lines and play with the music, and they have a burning narrative to tell.

Adult? Life’s too short to be adult, and dancers are poets -- and tweets discourage the aloneness that poets need. (Despite the fact that Mildred Dunnock famously listened to the world series on a transistor radio during her Death of a Salesman performances.)

Yes Joseph, it's a University of Wisconsin Press Studies in Dance History Book, edited and with an excellent introductory survey by Stephanie Jordan, translated by Dorinda Offord, 2002. Fedor Vasilevich Lopukhov's dates were 1886-1973.

It's available through Ballet Talk's Amazon link. He's University of Wisconsin's description:

U Wisconsin Press

Patrick:

the party that Janis Joplin came to 'at the big house on Franklin Avenue

I’ll have to read the White Album again -- it always is checked out or missing at the library. The house on Franklin may have been Preston Sturges’ -- big perhaps in comparison to the little guest house where a gardener friend used to live - or big in comparision to the little cottages on surrounding streets called exotically Heliotrope or Poinsettia. Joan Didion seems both to want to throw herself into the sixties and yet stay aloof. Too bad there isn’t more about Janis Joplin (though there’s the nice detail about her ordering Benedictine & Brandy) or Morrison. Interesting that both Didion and Elizabeth Bishop interviewed Kathleen Cleaver in San Francisco, bodyguards and security and all.

Late post but I've been reading the English translation of Lopukhov Writings on Ballet and Music which the San Francisco Library has just acquired. It has a first hand account of the original Esmeralda Pas de Diane:

Vaganova removed the part of the Satyr, thereby eliminating the conflict between Endymion and the Satyr that is the culmination of the whole ensemble; as a result, the work has lost its narrative and choreographic harmony. I remember Petipa's Satyr well, as danced first by Georgy Kiaksht and later by Leonid Leontiev. The Satyr's leg jerked as if to kick away Endymion (originally Vaslav Nijinksy) who lept over him in a soubresaut, while Diana (Anna Pavlova) took flight in jetes. Together the three enacted an unforgettable choreographic masterpiece.

Lopukhov describes another lost masterpiece the pas de cinque from The Daughter of Pharoah "an unsurpassed masterpiece of choreographic sonata form" that begins with an adagio for one man and four women, moving from one group pose to another. Fokine danced the male role "devising his own Egyptian-style arm positions" and Lopukhov feels that "the direct influence of the pas de cinq manifests itself in ballets such as Eros, Les Sylphides, and Papillons, in the asymmetry of the grouping (especially true of Papillons, a ballet not forgotten.)"

Anyway Lopukhov is fascinating reading, especially his criticism of Petipa and Ivanov for having lost confidence in Tchaikovsky and for making cuts and changing the order of dances in Swan Lake ("only Act II is good") and not giving the metamorphosis of the girl into a swan to an oboe, as Tchaikovsky had in the full orchestral version -- which Lopukhov thinks Petipa was not familiar with, only a rehearsal trio of first and second violins and piano.

Quick post: Tuesday's program drew me to the Company B which I've always totally ignored whenever it popped up on the program, probably because of my overfamiliarity with the music. This time I could see the narrative and the counterpoint between soloists and rest of the company and I was especially moved by There'll Never Be Another You, done by Katita Waldo and Quinn Wharton. There should be a lot more Taylor done by San Francisco Ballet, he shows off the dancers quite well, and should be so honored while he's still around.

The star of the new Wheeldon Ghosts was a fussy mid-1950's sculpture piece, the sort of thing that David Smith and San Francisco's Richard Serra justly rebelled against. It loomed and threatened and creaked over the dimly lit dancers. Sofiane Sylve was a joy to watch, but I couldn't put the spilled puzzle pieces of the choreography together in any way. There was a bit of Seranade and Russian Seasons and it ended as in Apollo, with the sculpture as the thing everyone has waited for to rescue or to condemn them. Wheeldon brilliantly devours the past but seldom is there a new thing being made, or a center of stablility or home key from which to drift or take liberties. It's all liberties.

He [Hardy] was friend and, to some extent, mentor to T. E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other very 20th century writers.

Including Auden. Thanks, Ed, for sending me back to my copy of Thomas Hardy Selected Poems (which I bought in all places Fresno California!) and these wonderful lines ---

"Close up the casement, draw the blind, shut out that stealing moon ..."

"The Roman road runs straight and bare As the pale parting-line in hair Across the heath ..."

&

"What past can be yours O journeying boy Towards a world unknown ... "

"A little boy with a violin At the station before the train came in ... As the fiddle began to twang, and the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee: 'This life so free Is the thing for me!' ..."

&

Coming up Oxford Street: Evening

"The sun from the west glares back,

And the sun from the watered track,

And the sun from the sheets of glass,

And the sun from each window-brass..."

which leads perhaps, through Auden, to Elizabeth Bishop's Letter to N.Y.:

"and coming out of the brownstone house

to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,

one side of the buildings rises with the sun

like a glistening field of wheat.

"Wheat, not oats, dear I'm afraid

if it's wheat it's none of your sowing..."

I have a copy of the Patti Smith book coming -- to be lent by a friend who says he loved it because of the period it covers, the vanished world of the lower east side and the last real bohemia which finally ended about 1985. It was just the point both of us moved to New York and you did feel something was over, that you were passing through the same setting still slightly warm with remnants of artworks of the seventies, at least down on the Bowery and in SoHo.

I'm still reading Javier Marias' Your Face Tomorrow, part 1, very stop and go but with brilliant meditative stretches, like reading Montaigne. It's about M15 and M16 and spying and the rarified world of Oxford and the Spanish Civil War. In real life Marias' father was falsely denounced by a fellow academic, a friend, and as a result couldn't teach again.

Here's a snippet-view of Sir Peter Wheeler talking -- he's based on Marias' friend the scholar Sir Peter Russell. Marias published Your Face Tomorrow in three parts so that his father and his friend, who were both very frail, could at least read a part of the novel:

When you’re young, as you know, you’re in a hurry and always afraid that you’re not living enough, that your experiences are not varied enough, you feel impatient and try to accelerate events, if you can and so you load yourself up with them, you stockpile them, the urgency of the young to accumulate scars and to forge a past, it’s so odd that sense of urgency. No one should be troubled by that fear, the old should teach them that ... At the end of any reasonably long life however anodyne and grey and uneventful, there will always be too many memories and too many contradictions, too many sacrifices and omissions and changes, a lot of retreats, a lot of flags lowered and a lot of acts of disloyalty, that’s for sure ... Too much accumulation. Too much vague material collected together, too much for one story, even for a story that is only ever thought .. Not to mention the infinite number of things that fall within the eye’s blind spot ...

I'm sure I've been a huge help in helping you narrow your choices.

Well, yes -- I've definitely whittled it down to sometime in May ... But then I haven't seen Scotch Symphony for an awfully long time.

The complete Spring schedule seems to be up, with many -- too many this time -- tempting combinations to fly to New York to see. I don't remember "Dances Concertantes" -- originally done in the late 1940s, re-choreographed in 1972 and central pas revised in 1975. What it like? It's scheduled with Brahms-Schoenberg on one program along a new Wheeldon.

Any other recommendations for long weekends this spring?

Are you somehow accessing a more lengthy version? or talking about another review?

Sorry, I was running to a meeting and didn't double check -- the comment was indeed from another review, the introduction to the New Directions edition of Night of the Iguana, by Doug Wright, which opens with:

The cast of the original production was perhaps as fine as any that has been assembled for Night of the Iguana. Bette Davis, who had been performing in movies for a number of years and thus had an unfortunate tendency to look out into the audience when she was "off camera," nevertheless embodied the earthiness of Maxine described by Williams as affable and rapaciously lusty ...

He goes on to say:

Not surprisingly, however, it was Margaret Leighton who performed most memorably in her luminous creation of Hannah, the kind of woman Tennesse Williams may have believed his sister Rose might have been ...

In general, I like theater and cinema to be kept separate -- both are very different in character, and a hybrid of the two is less than either one. Andre Bazin credits Orson Welles and Jean Renoir as being to deal with both with some honesty. But the lovely ocean scenes in Night of Iguana and the Williams dialogue seem to be from different artistic cloth. And as Bazin suggests theater and film have a different sort of time (Gene Kelly says something similar about stage time regarding musicals). Bazin in What is Cinema:

The duration of the action on the stage and on screen are obviously not the same. The dramatic primacy of the word is thrown off center by the additional dramatization that the camera gives to the setting.

I took a look at Suddenly Last Summer last night for the first time in years and did enjoy it. It seemed like the well made MGM film of the 1960s, with the exception of the Expressionist ending of the manikin-Sebastian running up the hill. This falls far short of Williams' lush and descriptive narrative and doesn't really pull its weight as a visual equivalent. But the scenes between Taylor and Clift are very good (though Clift's face no longer can express subtle variations) and yes Hepburn is good too ... The review of the stage Iguana says that Davis (I, too, was intrigued about the mysterious "Bette David") was excellent but she tended to look to the audience between her lines, a bad habit from making films. It would have been great if Margaret Leighton could have been in the film.

The way that Tennessee Williams films are watered down isn't by censorship but by fleshing them out with off-stage filmic context, to naturalize them. It's all filler and and a waste and the parts that work seem to me to be the same, small scale one-on-one parts that worked on stage. It's Williams words and all his old themes and stories and how he stretches them out and reworks them that are at the heart of the films -- no more, perhaps less, than what Bart says he hears in the bare stage direct readings.

In the nineteenth century audiences knew how to play some of the music they were listening to -- Schubert lived off royalties from sheet music, not recordings, and many people in ballet audiences have taken ballet lessons at some point. Even regarding the dance illiterate Edwin Denby asks how many people must be in their small kitchens after ballet performances trying to retrace all the wonderful steps they've just seen.

But it is true dancers know the music in their bones -- and audience members only in their eyes. I try to look at dance as a painter would or as architecture, but most of the contemporary choreography seems to aim only at clothing the dancer in a series of interesting movements (the subject for another whole thread) and less about the overall architecture and abstract narrative. The unruly Michael Clark Company is sort of an exception.

In the fifties Balanchine had a cross-over audience of writers and artists who were keenly interested in his visual intelligence and wit and visual puns -- "seeing genius unfold" according to Edmund White -- and somehow that dance grammar (following Petipa's) helps your body feel out what the eyes are seeing -- and provides the non-dancer with something of map to try out parts of steps discreetly at the bus stop or in the kitchen.

I saw two of the casts of Swan Lake, with Maria Kochetkova and Gennadi Nedvigin, and with Vanessa Zahorian and Taras Domitro. Vanessa and Taras danced beautifully, in perfect partnership, best ever, and their night (Friday, to be repeated Sunday) of Swan Lake really became interesting with their first pas and didn’t stop after that. Vanessa went into a brilliant overdrive in the middle of one of her black swan variations (it’s interesting that the most joyful and celebratory scene in Swan Lake, akin to the exuberance of Don Q, is danced under almost totally false pretenses). Taras at one turn brought his right leg up at an almost 90 degree angle to his torso and then up beyond that, hand high, as if an afterthought, nothing splashy, very natural and lyrical and it brought involuntary cries from the young dancers in the audience nearby. His detailing is small and finely wrought -- if it were a typeface it would be italic Garamond to Gennadi’s Bell. Gennadi possessed the stage like a prince from the start -- like Igor Zelensky in Sleeping Beauty that the Kirov/Maryinksky brought to the Bay Area a few years ago. It’s not that his acting range is so great but, with his open face and broad armspread, he makes everything interesting he does, you want to follow it all out, see which way his hands are flexed next. When he first looks at Odette, it seems to stop everything, and you seem to be able to read his thoughts. I’ll second PeggyR about Maria’s wonderfulness and add that I thought her Odile looked like a whimsical juvenile delinquent in a fifties film and that Damian Smith was very effective, but his choice of involuntarily cocking his head to the side, like a birdman from a Batman episode, perhaps lessened the mysterious psychology of von Rothbart.

I also agree with Ginasf that the prologue to Swan Lake -- an in front of the curtain, entr’acte scene of von Rothbart arbitrarily picking on or picking up Odette -- is superfluous and it banalizes the story. I also agree that this version of Swan Lake doesn't naturally pierce the heart, that it's been normalized in some way.

I regret not having seen Lorena Feijoo and Vitor Luiz -- if anyone has, please post!

Thanks for the great photo. The cover looks a bit like the format of the old Kapp LPs you occasionally find in record bins. Does the tape play?

I liked these liner notes -- from what I could make out:

In the sheer joy of making music, Bizet expanded everything he had borrowed. Each of his movements is much longer than the corresponding one of Gounod. Gounod’s little fugue consists chiefly of a rather formal expositiion; Bizet adds a whole set of strettos written in the most natural manner. Gounod uses a rustic drone[?]bass in his scherzo; Bizet colors it with a bit of local realism by actually reproducing the peculiar scale of a bagpipe. And the melodies -- they sing and dance in the most original way in this precocious work. In following his model Bizet did not lose his own personality.

Howard Shanet

Even though I love to watch Petipa and have the Vladimirov "Bluebird" on my ipod touch, and want to say "Symphony in C" because it brings back the feeling of the most exciting things that could ever happen to you as a child, or the "Four Temperaments" which are Balanchine's Beethoven (maybe his Diabelli Variations), or even "Donizetti Variations" out of left field, I have would to say -- voting with MakarovaFan -- that I love "Emeralds" most of all because it is the most mysterious and full of such fascinating emotional flows and counterflows.