Klavier

I do find Liebeslieder Waltzes tedious, because it seems to me so dull for Brahms, and the dancing doesn't do much for me here either.

If we're going to be heretical about Balanchine, Stars and Stripes pas de deux puts me right to sleep, as does most of Western Symphony.

Coppelia is the no. 1 boring classical ballet for me.

Add for me all that slow marching at the start of Union Jack.

I found Eifman's Musagète to be boring, confusing, and musically incoherent.

Don Quixote, which I only saw once danced by the Boston Ballet (with Erica Cornejo!), seemed overlong and musically thin. There was one long stretch in the second act, if I recall, where one ballerina danced a variation, then Quixote crossed to one side of the stage and made a big dramatic gesture, then another variation, then Quixote crossed back to the other side of the stage and made the same gesture. Why couldn't he just stay put?

I find that if I don't care for the music, my interest in the ballet is often proportionally lessened. Give me Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Ravel, all the other great composers Balanchine and Robbins resurrected for ballet from Bizet to Bach to Brahms/Schoenberg - but I dread having to endure the musique dansante of Minkus, Adam, and to a somewhat lesser extent even Delibes. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy parts of them - like the Shades in Bayadère and the Bronze Idol - but I want music with greater nourishing power than cardboard.

I do find Liebeslieder Waltzes tedious, because it seems to me so dull for Brahms, and the dancing doesn't do much for me here either.

Another underestimated dancer (in Alexandra's sense) is Sascha Radetsky -- who, coincidentally, includes Hilarion among his roles.

Radetsky has certainly been overshadowed by other male dancers at ABT despite receiving much praiise from critics and many memers of the audience.

Come to think of it, his character in the movie Center Stage is rather underestimated by the female lead. She rejects him for the much flashier Ethan Stiefel -- one of whose roles at ABT is Albrecht.

I'd hate to have to pull out the DVD of that thing again, but doesn't the female lead come back to Sascha at the end, telling the Stiefel character that he's a pretty good choreographer, but as a boyfriend "you kind of suck"? (Remember, I'm quoting; I have no way to verify.)

edit: oops - never mind - Helene got there already, albeit with less salty language.

The dumbest thing in Peter Martins' Romeo and Juliet has to be that quintet of little boys.

I see there is no easy definitive answer. I will let you know what I chose of course when I report back.

I don't know if you're specifically looking to subscribe, but personally I don't buy subscriptions but wait for the casting lists to make sure I get the ballets I want with the casts I want. And I usually get good seats doing it that way. To me, the season doesn't look super-exciting, but that's mainly because there are a lot of re-treads of things I've seen recently. The two ballets not seen last year that I most want to see are Goldberg Variations and Prodigal Son.

OMG -- I did mean the Gigue. Please forgive.

No reason to. It is a gigue that opens as a 3-voice fugue, and in its original piano version, one of the trickiest pieces Mozart ever wrote. Betcha Mutt and Jeff didn't know that.

Responses to this question, it seems to me, have a lot to do with whether one expects or wants to see the same work multiple times in a season, with or without different casting. Those who do so seem to dislike the block programming concept the most. For someone like myself who lives outside the city and is satisfied to see perhaps 4-5 performances a season, block programming does not disturb as much. Ticket prices aside, I could not afford the time and expense of travelling into NYC more than once a week as a rule. So I just pick and choose the programs and casts I want, and if I get a clunker once in a while, so be it.

Inevitably, I can't help recalling the last stanza of Yeats's "Among School Children." Is it relevant?

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

For the whole poem:

http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/A...Yeats/Among.htm

My vote: 4

Symphony orchestras, not to mention other ballet companies, have used the block programming concept for years, more or less successfully. One advantage is that you avoid seeing duplications, though of course if you want to see the same work twice you have to put up with the rest of the program.

The main complaint here is that this or that viewer doesn't like all the works on a particular program. But that could be the case with the older style of programming as well; and unfortunately so long as Peter Martins continues to believe he is a master choreographer, we will be treated to more ballets by Peter Martins.

The other complaints, both of which I agree with, concern the titles and the imposition of an artificial "theme" (rather than simply a nicely selected, balanced program of contrasting works). However, I'm less impressed by the complaint against Apollo-Orpheus-Agon, because the idea of a Greek trilogy had been a wish of Kirstein's for many years.

'Martins - whose father is the ballet's mercurial master-in-chief, Peter Martins'

It could be an oblique reference to the fact that Martins created a character called Mercutio in Romeo + Juliet. Or maybe it is not.

Well, I'm glad he is likely to get off with little more than a slap on the wrist. But I hope if he has a substance problem, and if it's related to his not very well received efforts at NYCB, that he takes serious steps to resolve both those things.

Sorry to be politically incorrect but Nilas Martins of late has struck me as being a rather bland dancer with a stodgy physique, cocaine causes weight loss and euphoria and manic behavior. I have seen no evidence of its use on his dancing!!!

A brilliant defense! "Of course he's innocent, just watch him dance!"

why is that sad to you? he isn't accused or charged.

Because it can't be a positive thing for him or his career (at least in the short run) to be associated with the situation.

And after all, "Police would neither confirm nor deny whether Ramasar is the dancer with the same name listed on the NYCB Web site." For all we know, there are a dozen or more Amar Ramasars in Saratoga at this time.

Sorry to inject the above note of levity, but only a police mentality would make a statement so cautious.

Pleased for all, though I don't know anything of Kajiya. I would have liked to see Hee Seo and Isaac Stappas promoted as well.

Goodness. How unfortunate.

Unfortunate that he apparently has a problem, or unfortunate that he was caught?

I hope the company will offer discrete detox for other dancers with their addictions.

Isn't that making an assumption that there are other dancers similarly addicted?

I'd be interested to see what you think of Symphony in C in the same way, Jane.

Well, I did rather wonder if the reason they're bringing things which are in the RB's repertory is to show us how they should be done!

I doubt the motive per se was to rival or show up the RB - more like, this is Balanchine's company, and we're here to display some of our signature works.

Naive question from me: would it be feasible / realistic / desirable to see the same ballerina take the leads in all three parts of Jewels? (By analogy to the way the same soprano often takes the leads in all acts of The Tales of Hoffmann.)

Let's consider ballet dancers as a percentage of the population. Pretty few. Exciting job to the outside world, hard work on the inside.

Then let's consider sandhogs. Again, not many, but probably more than ballet dancers. Interesting, dangerous work, but I don't know if many have ended up characters in adult fiction!

Can't think of any sitcoms about ballet dancers either.

In the recent past, there have been two I can think of: Yona Zeldis McDonough's The Four Temperaments, in which a middle-aged violinist in the NYCB orchestra falls for a young corps member, who, after their affair, falls in love with his son. . . .

Not knowing the book, I'm amused by the possibilities suggested by the pronoun "his."

There are plenty of actors and not a few opera singers who appear as characters in fiction for adults. But where are the ballet people -- dancers, choreographers, impressarios?

Off the top of my head I can think only of Mademoiselle Florentine, a recurring minor character in Balzac's fiction. Although she's a star dancer at the Gaiete and elsewhere, we learn about her only as she affects the men in and out of her life.

Can anyone think of other ballet characters in fiction for adults?

I know there's a certain amount of ballet fiction for children and teens. (For example, here: http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=14900 ) But the adult ballet world seems missing.

And why, I wonder, is that?

Does drama count? In Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays (and hence in Berg's opera), Lulu in one scene is depicted as a dancer.

In Oscar Wilde's Salome (and hence in Strauss's opera), Salome does her dance of the seven veils.

Good question, though.

While Ballet Talkers have been parsing Alistair Macauley's sentences and measuring his column-inches-per-ballerina at the New York Times, something tremendous happened at the New York Observer: Robert Gottlieb gave a good review to New York City Ballet! I quote from the July 2-July 9 issue:

"If Kowroski continues in this new expansive vein, if Somogyi fully recovers, if the Bouder locomotive doesn't derail (and it won't), we finally have the dancers to bring to life the parched earth of the recent painful years. And I haven't even mentioned another new charmer, Sterling Hyltin, who suggested in Martins' Jeu de Cartes, that faux-"Rubies," what she'll be able to do with the real thing."

Then, returning to the subject of the Kyra Nichols farewell, Gottlieb concluded: "She's earned her retirement, however painful it is for the rest of us, and she claimed it joyously. After Vienna Waltzes, she stood on the stage accepting the cheers and the bouquets, modest, centered, unpretentious, superb -- and glowing with happiness, her arms around her two little boys. She was telling us she had a future. And now, against the odds, the company may have one too."

He gave City Ballet another good review one month ago:

http://www.observer.com/2007/one-enchanted...t-gets-it-right

Of course, those are just a couple of performances out of hundreds. And though he states, "As always with Balanchine, we start with the ballerinas," only two of the men get scarcely a (mostly negative) mention.

Now there's an idea I'd like to see implemented. How about a link available/attached to every critic's review to a bio/resume giving the reader an opportunity to know the critic's background, years of professional experience, ballet experience, dancer training, theater, music, journalism training, books written, etc.

I'd prefer to see that attached to every blog, but too many frauds would be exposed.

I wonder if Macaulay is in the position of teachers and writers who assumed that a well-educated populace had knowledge of history, Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and Latin, only to find this assumption overly optimistic.

As someone who teaches undergraduates, I would say any such assumption is misguided, begining with the basic assumption that the populace is well-educated.

sorry if that sounds jaded but once a generally bright kid writes about "the sun that followed Jesus around" (um, you mean a halo?) you learn not to take anything for granted!

I see nothing has changed since I left undergraduate teaching in 1985.

We should anthologize ourselves.

Isn't that this?

No. An anthology would be a selective collection.

"a veritable tsunami of gush" (dirac); "somova/allova" (Mel).

The funniest & wittiest writers seem to be at bt.

We should anthologize ourselves.