Quiggin

It seems like a holding pattern set of programs.

For Balanchine why Divertimento #15, which was done without any wit or understanding this year, instead of Symphony in C, which was done with quite some brilliance, and a great crowd pleaser to boot? Diamonds really depends on a Julie Diana or perhaps Yuanyuan Tan to pull it off.

Why Fancy Free and West Side Story on the same bill? Why not Dances at a Gathering? Or Square Dance (not Robbins but even better)? Is Michael Kidd worth reviving?

And why not Symphonic Variations or Monotones I & II while there are dancers around who still remember doing them?

But Carousel I'm really looking forward to seeing again.

Regarding Tiit and Molly, a company dancer I was briefly talking to remarked that the word was that they danced more lightly and spontaneously Saturday evening than they had in earlier performances. Also with a little less makeup, according to some of the sharp-eyed audience regulars (this was a topic of a discussion while waiting afterwards on the 47 Van Ness bus).

Gonzalo danced differently with Vanessa--perhaps it was the choreography of act three of Don Q. or perhaps she's more of a adagio dancer than Tina. Tina does all of the steps and dances with great brilliance and throws her leg behind her in a flash while Vanessa has more of an up and down, head-to-toe languorous style. ("Above all the others, Vanessa's my favorite," a 47 Van Ness rider said quietly but firmly to her friend, as if to lay to rest the subject.)

On Sunday Tiit and Muriel danced Agon a little soft edged, but they struck some beautiful and haunting images along the way. He was quite good earlier in the season in Divertimento #15 but couldn't save it. No one at SFB understood what that ballet is about; it had none of the wit and mysteriousness and slightly coarse exaggeration about it that it needs (Arlene Croce says it was famous for being badly produced for years by the NYCB).

The Muriel Maffre Farewell overall was wonderful. I'm not that fanatical about her as (most) others are, but there were lots of great examples of her art with leisurely interval/intermissions in between. She seems to stand straight, mostly in place, while, like an illuminated initial in an old manuscript, she slowly defines herself tendril by tendril.

About Gonzalo, what can you say? He brings/brought to everything at SFB a depth and focus it wouldn't quite have without him. In his entrance on a horn in Symphony in C, is he awakening us or are we awakening him? When he jumps, he seems to change the tempo and conditions of his turn mid air. He mischieviously pickpockets time, in little amounts, here and there.

My only bluebird was Anton Korsakov with the Kirov in Berkeley. I've forgone others because I didn't was to diminish the memory, but I would see Herman Cornejo in the role gladly.

Ethel Merman was notoriously inflexible--not a great thing for filmaking--and did the same performance year in and year out. In her obit she was quoted saying to Irving Berlin (or another songwriter) something like, "I won't change. It's set and frozen. Call me Miss Birds Eyes peas, if you like."

Yes, Bette Garrett or Mary Martin would have been great in Annie Get Your Gun, probably better than Bette (who I liked most in the Greatest Show on Earth with Cornel Wilde.)

Another "live wire" of early tv might have been Joan Davis of I Married Joan, a sort of "B" version of I Love Lucy (Jim Backus was the "I"; the car he faithfully came home in--for lunch and dinner--was a Kaiser-Fraser). She had big eyes and what they used to call a "horseface." Jerry Seinfeld has some of the same look.

Klavier,

I agree with you wholeheartedly about music and dance and find your three categories most helpful. Regarding the third, I think that no one should ever choreograph to Beethoven (or Mahler). Beethoven's music is too saturated and self-questioning and complete to have dance set to it. Balanchine, once a composer himself (he composed music for Mravinsky's--who was then, in turn, a poet--lyrics) had impeccable taste in these matters. Only once did he approach Mozart directly, and only then a divertimento, albeit lovely and haunting.

I've forgotten the specifics but in an interview with a director in the Financial Times some time back the director talked about the differences between New York and London audiences regarding a particular play. He said the English audience giggled at the references to God and were stilled by the talk about money, whereas the American addiences giggled about money but went quiet at any mention of God.

Brioche,

Anything you can report on Mary Ellen Moylan's thoughts on ballet, on changes in the Balanchine style over the years, any interesting anecdotes not in the Anne Belle film?

Dale,

I am not certain, but Joceyn Vollmar may also have been one of the early Sangs too. Her wikipedia entry is in German and doesn't say, but at a San Francisco PALM event I believe she talked about the role. (I'll have to check my notes.) She said the 4Ts was a great hit from the beginning.

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Vollmar

Back onTopic, I think if I been a member of the audience at City Center in the early 50's, my most favorite would have been Mary Ellen Moylan, even above Maria T. Something about her at once aristocratic and earthy way of carrying herself. (Or so I imagine it to have been.)

How beautiful she was (and the costume). Moylan is sort of forgotten a bit.

There's a great clip of Mary Ellen Moylan doing the Sanguinic variation of the 4Ts in Dancing for Mr B. It's where the two dancers are describing a cornucopia-shaped spiral, and her hands are either directing the reduction of--or braking, it's always very mysterious to me--the arc they are making.

MEM also describes the comedy of dancing with the original stiff and elaborate costumes, and how they--"snip, snip"--became less and less of a presence in the ballet.

Chipiniana

Here's Tiler Peck's bio from a Bakersfield California link:

http://www.dancersturnout.com/staff.php

Disclaimer: I grew up in a tiny town near Bakerfield. Bakersfield is the source of the Bay Area's oil (you could see it travel alongside the railway tracks to San Francisco in pipelines that made fascinating loops and twists as the train raced alongside it), cowboy songs, wonderful Basque cooking, and now NYCB ballerinas.

I saw Darcy Bussell in the whole live, real Agon, as did Leigh, not the shorter version at the centennial, and though she is not an orthodox Balanchine dancer, something about her concentration and slightly behind the beat approach made her stand out. Especially in the group of several dancers getting their various jabbing movements in. In performance, she was far more arresting than she is in on tape.

I was also fascinated with her concentration and enunciation in Symphony in C.

Looks like KQED's broadcasts this week in the San Francisco Bay Area are only on their HD channel, no conventional (4th ring) viewing available.

In San Francisco KQED has contradictory info on Bringing Back Balanchine scheduling. It will probably be shown as follows, but everyone should double-check--

Thursday 11/16/2006 at 9pm (The weekly schedule has Walking the Bible/40 Years in the Desert here).

Sunday, 11/19/06 at 6pm

Saturday, 12/9/06 at 4pm

It's listed as 56 minutes so I guess we're missing a significant chunk, hopefully not all the good stuff.

I haven't read Stephen Walsh's Second Exile, but was intrigued by the recent TLS review by composer Hugh Wood. "Agon" is mentioned as the highlight of Stravinsky's late period.

Yes, it is indeed strange that dance doesn't exist for many musicians and music writers, or have any physical basis for them, even with the terms tanze, muzurka, tarrantella, courante, allemande right in front of their eyes.

Here are some excerpts from the review:

The story is told with great clarity, ease, grace and wit: the lightly ironic tone of some passages could have been caught from Stravinsky himself. One might be reading one of the great nineteenth-century novelists. Walsh presents a huge cast of characters round the main figure, deploying them with great skill: not many biographers have the gift of bringing even the minor figures they are writing about so vividly alive for us. And he has the ability and the will to empathize as well as to judge, and to extend an over-arching Tolstoyan sympathy to all the personages of the drama.

* * *

There was to be a moment of Agony in the Garden, or rather the Mojave Desert, when Stravinsky declared himself finished as a composer, broke down and wept – the vulnerable and insecure side of him for once breaking surface. But this was shortly followed by plans for the Cantata – a sort of resurrection of the spirit: “the Easter vigil had for him, that year, a special significance”. The extraordinary artistic rejuvenation that followed proved that “old men ought to be explorers”. Among the last works, Agon shines brightest in its vitality, its invention and its vivid instrumental sense.

* * *

Some years ago, the present writer was travelling on a south London suburban train and overheard a conversation about music between two schoolboys. Eventually, summing up, one of them said, with the solemn conclusiveness of fifteen or sixteen years: “When you come down to it, man, there’s only two people who matter – Beethoven and Stravinsky”. Stephen Walsh’s book makes you feel he was right.

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25...443560,00.html 

There is also a good review on Elizabeth Gaskell by Heather Glen in the same TLS issue ("Elizabeth Gaskell's Resurrection").

It's an institutional prejudice, I fear. I was dismayed by the Times obituary for Derrida.

It's a bit like that at the New Yorker too. Alex Ross takes rather cheap shots at Adorno who, while extemely difficult, has written beautifully on Beethoven, Mahler, and on the language of music.

Even Michael Kimmerman at the Times in otherwise excellent review on the terrible replacement for the Musee de l"Homme in Paris, stops Walter Benjamin short:

The critic Walter Benjamin, who remarked that "there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism," said he could not "contemplate without horror" the works we call "cultural treasures."

That was going too far.

NYTimes: Kimmelman article

Everything goes too far for the Times.

Thanks, Papeet, for the Kakutani link. It predisposes me towards Franzen. Kakutani gets so angry I can barely read her--her run of the mill adjectives almost burst at the seams with anger towards whoever she is reviewing. And the last paragraph is routinely merciless.

She can be sensible from time to time. She wrote an essay about how young people are afraid to express themselves, afraid to enter into debate, for fear of offending anyone. And that this was impoverishing us as a nation. But then she went on to ruin it by blaming it all on the powerful influence of French intellectual thought, Derrida, Barthes et al, her bete noir, over English language literature.

I'm not generally fond of contemporary fiction nowadays, so it was quite exciting to hear Messud respond to a listener's question about Tom Wolfe by commenting that she had never read his work, didn't read a lot of contemporary fiction, and actually prefers 19th century novels like "Buddenbrooks" and the works of Tolstoy. And this from someone who is quite young!

Claire Massud is married to the critic James Wood, who has been writing on and on (in the New Republic and most recently N+1) about the state of the contemporary novel, so they must have a lot to talk about over breakfast and dinner on this subject. Here is Wood in the Guardian on the "glass bottom boat" school of writing of many current novelists--the sort of writing Claire Massud seems to be pushing away from:

Franzen is a very intelligent, very appealing writer; so much so that an essentially dark book stays in the memory as warm and comic. To call it Tolstoyan seems exaggerated, however. The novelist Michael Cunningham likens it to Buddenbrooks, but a comparison of those two novels shows The Corrections to be wide rather than deep, and smart rather than subtle. It has some of Mann's sweep and some of his gentle comedy (and even some of his Schopenhauer); but it lacks the luminous control of that great German book. Indeed, The Corrections suffers from a desire to put too much in. His novel is a kind of glass-bottomed boat through which one can glimpse most of the various currents of contemporary American fiction: domestic realism; postmodern cultural riffing; campus farce; "smart young man's irony" of the kind familiar in Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace; and, rather too often, an easy journalism of style.

Just finished Roberto Bolano’s book of short stories "Last Evenings on Earth". Good though less so than "By Night in Chile". The narrator of By Night is a priest—in his youth he was a poet—going over the events of his life to himself, not quite taking in much of what is implied. Neruda and Pinochet are minor characters, and there is a great chapter about a seemingly innocent Opus Dei assignment. In "Last Evenings" the story of the Grub was a standout and, in another story, there is a long, very effective retelling of Tarkovsky’s great film Andrei Rubelov. Bolano’s tone is always perfection and carries you nicely over all sorts of rough expository terrain.

Will reread last summer’s H P Hartley’s sad and beautiful "Eustace and Hilda" about a dreamy and impractical brother and his overly practical sister—closely tied to each other—and a sort of Miss Haversham character they meet who changes their lives. A friend of mine—a great Jane Austen fan—has just returned E&H to me to keep himself from reading it a third time.

Also Elizabeth Bowen’s comedic "Death of the Heart", about Portia Quayne, who been left an orphan and is provisionally living in her half-brother’s unfriendly home in London. There is the great character of Eddie, the charming, bad boyfriend of all time, and there is a gruff maid named Machett who almost alone sees the truth of everything. It opens as many of EB’s stories do with an image of swans who swim with icy indignation.

My hypothesis is that the POB Jewels DVD signals a new phase in Balanchine dancing and its transmission, both geographically and over time. I'm guessing that the original Balachine precept of no-acting (let the steps express the emotions) may have had its time.

The same thing happened with Stravinsky's music. For a long time conductors followed Stravinsky's lead in focussing on the rhythm. No wallowing in the lyricism. Objectivity. However conductors like Salonen and Chailly have revealed a layer of romanticism in the music formerly covered over by Stravinsky's precept that music is unfit to express anything but the music.

But Balanchine was very much a modernist and POB version of Jewels is something of an eclectic and additive interpretation. To reintroduce all the things Balanchine purposely left out or dephasized--great facial expression and upper body vibrato--is like taking a Mies van der Rohe structure and putting back on the Biedermeier and art neauveau ornamentation that Mies during a long period of distillation took off. (In Mies' case you'd end up with a 1980's Philip Johnson building.)

Composers and their music may be different case. We thrill in the liberties that conductors and performers take with scores, Mravinsky with Petrouska and Agon and Tchaikovsky, Richter and Sofronitsky and Yudina with Chopin and Schubert, among the Russians.

Fokine's work can perhaps take more adding onto and leaving out before it's no longer Fokine, but Balanchine may be a special case. Or perhaps someone director of choreography will come along, the equivalent of Glenn Gould or Bruno Maderna, and further radicalize Balanchine in the direction he was going all along.

Canbelto,

I haven't watched Mizoguchi for years--I saw four late films in one day at UCLA which was wonderfully intense--though I am very tempted to strart looking at them again.

I hesitate to recommend one particular film over the other--my own preference is for one with particulary fluid tracking shots--but I will post these helpful capsule reviews from the National Film Theater written sometime ago courtesy of Pacific Film Archives:

(more here with some right and left clicking: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/resources/p...ion/index.html)

Oharu: Here Mizoguchi consolidated the genre he made much of in his last years: a personal drama placed in an historical epoch (here the Genroku era) reconstructed in meticulous detail and containing implicity criticisms of the social forces which destroy innocent victims. The protagonist is the daughter of a samurai (Kinuyo Tanaka) who marries below her and then decends to concubine, prostitute and beggar. An historical fresco of great insight and depth, combining image and sound with and exciting freedom. Japan 1952. With Toshiro Mifune.

Ugetsu was the film which introduced Mizoguchi to the West. Its two parallel narratives eventually eventually concentrate on a potter desperately trying to continue his craft in a war-torn medieval village, who meets a phantom princess and is lured away to a land of sensual delights. Once again modern parallels are discernible but it rmains Mizoguchi's most celebrated period film with its superb lyrical images of misty lakes and lawns. And even he never equalled the emotional pull of Ugetsu's final reel. Japan 1953. With Machiko Kyo.

Sansho is not only a great classic of World Cinema, but one of Mizoguchi's most probing and rigously worked period pieces. Set in the 11th centurn, its packed narrative combines barbaric violence ( the corrupt opulence of Sansho's court) with a family story empasising loyalty and self-sacrifice. Particularly unforgetable are the kidnapping scenes on the beach, the flight through the forest and the son's search for his mother on the seashore. A work whose riches increase with each viewing. Japan 1954. With Kinuyo Tanaka

Story of the Late Chrysanthemums. This ficitonalized account of kabuki actor Onoe Kiunosuke--toppled from stardom by an illicit affair, finally reaching maturity through his lover's self-sacrifice--arguable marks the peak of Mizoguchi's art. Apart from the three scenes on the kabuki stage, the film is constructed in 'sequence-shots', long, mobile takes that refuse 'natural' continuities and instead create a delicately artifiical mesh of cross-rhythms and modulations. The plot premises are angrily feminist. Japan 1939 With Kakuko Mori, Shotaro Hanayagi

National Film Theater

Canbelto,

Life of Oharu, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff are supposed to be 3 great masterpieces, but I am fond of the early White Threads of the Waterfalls (there's a great tracking shot in it) and Utamaru (sp) about the great painter who is prohibited from making art for six months. Any Mizoguchi is great as film, though some of the attitudes toward women--ahead of their time at the time--seem a little disturbing today.

Here's David Thompson's recomendation to see at least one Mizoguchi on the big screeen:

"Mizoguchi worked with scale, space, and movement, and movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a great fish passing us in the water. So the greatness of Mizoguchi is no easier to discover now than it was in 1975. And this is a greatest that could one day soon be lost. By 2010 will it be possible to see these films on the screen they deserve?"

The irrepressible Lydia Lopokova (Lady Keynes) and Fyodor Lupukhov; Nicholas Lagat and the tragic Fyodor Lagat. (Eglevsky of the great cat landings studied with Nicholas for a year.)

http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/portrait...&rNo=1&role=sit

(from Herman Stevens) However these comments don't take away this is a beautiful version of Emeralds, and when you compare it with the previously mentioned seventies "Choreography by Balanchine" on Nonesuch it stands up really well, primarily because Pujol seems better suited to the role than Merill Ashley. Plus this is the complete ballet.

Yes, Merill Ashley, very much an allegro dancer, is somewhat overly anxious in the 70's Nonesuch version of Emeralds. She darts about like a goldfish, suddenly in one place, suddenly in another. I do find the complex counterpoint between the couple and the corps more readable in the 70's version, where everyone is squeezed together into the middle of the screen. (The liner notes say they transposed the ballet onto a triangular, rather than rectilinear, stage.)

However, the Nonesuch version is indeed a complete and authoritative ballet, reshaped on the spot by Balanchine, who added a whole new act. Cutting out the two women's solos is a great loss, but the transition directly from the first part to the pas de trois seems quite effective.

And the new ending deepens and makes the ballet even more mysterious. It's as if it's happening after the curtain goes down, some long unwinding. As at the end of Apollo, it looks as if they are preparing themselves for something, but just what are they--at the end only the men are left--preparing themselves for? (Faure is certainly less upbeat on this matter than Stravinsky.)

Frowny only in comparison to smiley: neutrally, introspectively. It's wonderful that we have this performance, but it shouldn't become the standard Jewels (especially as regard to tempos), which I fear it might. As mentioned previously here, we need the Kirov version (with Gergiev conducting) and the Miami versions on DVD for balance. Any chance of that?

Andrew,

But Emeralds should be frowny. It's an other-worldly ballet, or at least everyone is in her or his own world and the whole ballet in a box, separate from the audience--as opposed to say Ballet Imperial or Donizetti where everyone is dancing for each other and for the world. The Kirov's version of Emeralds seemed to be appropriately sober. And the Gergiev's tempos sharper, don't you think?