Klavier

A more detailed answer to your question is that certain areas of BT4D have been made accessible only to registered members, and still others are accessible only by admission after a member reaches a certain criterion (30 posts and 2 weeks, I believe). Others are available to the general, unregistered public. Thanks for the info, Mel and Treefrog.

After 88 posts (1 for each key on the keyboard), I've decided it's time to introduce myself to the forum. The nom de poste "Klavier" is not specifically an homage to Christopher Wheeldon's ballet of the same name. In fact, I am not a particular fan of that ballet, as I think late Beethoven does not lend itself very well to choreography. But it does reflect the fact that I have played the piano in my own enthusiastic but completely haphazard way since the age of 11. Which is now some 47 years ago, my birthdate having been September 11, 1948. I was born in New York City, grew up most of my life on Long Island, and went to college first in Ohio and then in Jersey, moving back to the Island about 18 years ago. I consider myself reasonably knowledgeable about classical music but virtually ignorant about dance. I became interested in classical music because the very pretty girl who sat across from me in 6th grade study period was continually reading 6th grade biographies of composers, and it seemed only logical that I should become a composer to impress her. Our family bought a piano, I started lessons (the first concert piece I learned, "Snug as a Bug in a Rug," is still one I play often with tears in my eyes), and I started writing a symphony. The upshot is that I never got anywhere with the girl, but my interest in music grew rapidly with the result that I was accepted to major in composition at the Oberlin Conservatory at age 18. (I was in fact a year ahead of Christopher Rouse, composer of Friandises, but I barely knew him.) Unfortunately my composing career came to nothing, I eventually got my degrees in English literature and taught at a minor mid-Atlantic college for some years. After losing a close tenure decision, I turned instead to technical writing, a field where I've been for the past 20+ years. As for dance, I can honestly say that before about 3 years ago, I may have gone to 5-6 dance performances in my life. Given the close relation of music to dance, I am always surprised at how unusual it is to find classical music fans actively interested in dance; in fact I know a few who would never set foot in a ballet house. As for myself, I can remember (naturally) the obligatory NYCB Nutcracker and I am certain I saw Baryshnikov once in The Prodigal Son at NYCB. I was also given tickets to an NYCB mixed bill where I saw Symphony in C, but what else and with whom I can't remember. I saw Cinderella done by the Royal Ballet at Lincoln Center, I saw Romeo and Juliet at the Vienna State Opera, and a mixed bill in Copenhagen that included Jerome Robbins's The Concert. But I generally took a far greater interest in attending concerts and opera. So what changed all this? Well, one evening I was hanging around the Lincoln Center Plaza waiting for my date for the opera, and standing next to me talking to a few friends was a young person whom I eventually learned was a dancer with one of the top New York companies. (To prevent any embarrassment to either this dancer - a very familiar name - or myself, I will not reveal their name or affiliation, and I may or may not have embellished some details of this story.) "What's your name?" I asked. "--- ---." "Sorry, never heard of you," I said. "Oh, --- is a wonderful dancer!" said one of the friends. "You must see ---!" And so, having nothing better to do a few weeks later, I saw ---'s name listed and bought a ticket. And indeed --- was a wonderful dancer. But even more, the entire program caught me up and made me wonder why I've been missing this all my life. Imagine - had I started earlier I could have seen all the great names at NYCB and ABT from the 70s and 80s. But I'm making up for lost time as best I can, having gone numerous times to both these companies in the past three years as well as Mark Morris, Ailey, Boston, San Francisco, and Joffrey. I can say I've seen Jock Soto, Peter Boal, Julio Bocca, and Amanda MacKerrow - but each only once, and each only at their farewell performances. Dance is fascinating in itself, and fascinating to me as a musical person. I've learned a lot from the forum already, and hope I can add my own klavierisch touch to the discussions.

I'll try to do so. For some reason, I had the impression that board was off-limits to non-dancers, and I didn't know if I was correct on that.

My broader question is whether members of the interested public who are not dancers can access BT4D at all, if just on a read-only basis.

I saw the Saturday night performance at Tilles and would be interested in reading the review at BTfD. But it appears I am not allowed to access this forum. Am I correct about this?

My world consists of 45+ years of concert-going, composing, playing, studying, and writing about classical music. I have yet to hear of any performer who would adjust an interpretation based on the advice of an audience member. If your conductor took tempos that agreed with your conception, that is most likely because he had a similar conception of his own already. I can more readily accept that (as I admit you do say) his "previous experience in Vienna" led him to select tempos appropriate for dancers. But however friendly and polite he or his staff may have been, I have a hard time believing he would have changed his interpretation if it had been one you found antipathetic.

I never found Peter Martins handsome, and Carlos Acosta is (I'm afraid) not very attractive, at least to my eyes. Very good-looking from ABT's current roster is Grant DeLong. Casting him as Paris alongside Hallberg and Paloma was a mistake, as I couldn't understand why she'd turn down Grant for David. I also like Craig Salstein for his unaffected American good looks. (My post made it here, but the server had an apparent glitch - probably it was mad at me for speaking ill of Carlos and Peter - and it didn't update the index or list of Last Posts.)

No surprise. No surprise.

Are you surprised?

I was thinking as well of Nutcracker time, when a dancer may not know what tempo to expect until he or she makes an entrance. "Oops - do I have to dance my guts out tonight? will I get someone who actually works with me? can I get all the steps in? can I do anything to slow this maniac down?" I promise you that if NYCB can't find just one or two time-beaters to share the podium for all 45 Nutcrackers, I'm more happy to volunteer. I may not be able to conduct, but I'd certainly work with the dancers to give them some comfort level.

I'm sure the presence of "house conductors" is part of it. How can musicians respond, how are dancers affected, when their "conductor" is a different face every night and there's no leadership or consistency of musical interpretation?

(a) But if the piece is being listened to on a CD or in a concert hall independent of dancing, should those tempos be as great a concern? (b) I strongly doubt the conductor specifically adjusted his tempos at your personal request. © Because the horn is an extremely difficult instrument to control. I've heard bobbles from the horns in even major orchestras. I really wish I could have gotten to that Gergiev evening. Unfortunately I had a bad cold that week. But I suspect he'll be back.

I'm not too disturbed at someone who calls Minkus or Adam "trash"; when I attended the former's Don Quixote at Boston Ballet a few months ago I marvelled continually at the skill of a composer whose music sounded invariably professional but never seemed to have an idea in its shallow little head. But as musique dansante it worked well, supporting the dances and dancers by providing a framework that kept the story moving along. On the other hand when I heard Mr. Cameron Grant, a perfectly capable pianist, do the Goldberg Variations of Bach while a dozen dancers on stage were performing Jerome Robbins's choreography, I was for once less aware of that masterly work as a piece of music and more as a setting for the interesting and surprising things on stage. The situation is not quite the same as in opera, where one has both singers and orchestra, because there all the performers are engaged in making music, but with dance it's hard to know what element should be primary and which secondary, or if music and dance have or should have equal bearing on the performance. When I attended Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto 2 at NYCB last month, I commented on the lackluster playing of Susan Walters, and wondered if a true bravura soloist in the Russian manner would have brought more of a daredevil quality to the musical performance and also would have energized the dancers. Yet no one else from the forum here mentioned Walters's playing. I tend to think that there is music that works best as an accompaniment for dance but which would never survive alone in the concert hall (e.g., Giselle, Don Quixote); music originally intended for dance but which is at least as strong in concert performance (Petrouchka, Agon, Miraculous Mandarin, Appalachian Spring, Le Sacre); music not originally intended for dance but which has attained new life as a vehicle for choreography (Bizet Symphony, Goldberg Variations, Brahms/Schoenberg); and music that is too independent or requires too much concentrated listening to succeed as an element in dance (Wheeldon's Klavier, set to the slow movement of Beethoven's Hammerklavier, certainly is in this class for me). One thing also that strikes me, as someone whose musical background is far stronger than his background in dance, is that, despite the important interrelations between music and dance throughout history, how unusual it is to find musical people who take much interest in ballet. I myself did not until a few years ago, and I know several classical musical fanatics who would not set foot in a ballet theater. A good friend who knows and loves Agon as a musical work has never seen the Balanchine choreography, but how can one separate the two? But part of the problem here is, if one can't get to a live performance, there are so few DVDs of many ballets, in contrast to the encyclopedic availability of music available on CD or DVD. Just some incoherent random thoughts for whatever they're worth.

Are any of these particularly recommended?

Quite all right. I don't take it personally.

Once single tickets are available, I would keep my eye on the Met's website, as you can order tickets from there with individual seat selection (hurrah*), and you will immediately see a seating chart and which sections are open. Within a section, if you don't like a particular seat, just request the same section again and you'll get the next seat available. As for seating if price is not a concern, I always try for the center orchestra, about rows G-T for optimal viewing. If you like sitting closer than that, be sure you're not dead center as you'll be seeing a lot of the conductor. Given that ballet at the Met costs about the same as an opera seat in the balcony, I don't think this price much of an extravagance. As for getting a ticket, even if the performance is "sold out," it may not be. The Julio Bocca farewell last year was supposedly sold out for weeks, but on the day, I simply called the Met box office every half hour when tickets were starting to be returned, and by 12 noon I had a seat in center orchestra row S. And for the adventurous there is also the buy-at-the-door approach, which I've talked about at the NYCB subforum. ----------- * NYCB still appears to think this is not a priority.

Not to mention nebulous. What on earth does the paragraph mean? 1) What is "frightening" about the well-rendered structure? Does poor Claudia go to bed suffering nightmares from the form of 4Ts? 2) What is a "blur of steps"? 3) What "ideas" does 4Ts have? 4) In what way is a choreographer at the dancers' mercy? Isn't there more a symbiosis between choreographer and dancers? 5) How does she know the dancers don't know what the choreographer is saying? Couldn't they just be tired? 6) How does she know the audience won't know the ballet and its "ideas" from previous experiences with it?

The only thing "Japanese" about Madame Butterfly is her kimono. In all other respects, she's another one of Puccini's long-suffering, victimized, thoroughly Italian sopranos. I have to admit though, that much as I enjoy some of Puccini (and I prefer his stronger, more dominant female leads like Tosca and Minnie), Butterfly, like Suor Angelica, is altogether too saccharine for my taste, and I've only seen the opera once - in a non-professional production at that.

Another, even more vulgar distortion of the composer's intent. As written, Mimi soars from high A to high C, and Rodolfo from F (not very high for a tenor) down to E. Both pianissimo! More often than not, what one hears is a fortissimo belt-fest for both singers in unison, completely destroying the poetry of that ending.

That is correct. As written, the last tenor note in Dqp is a G, which makes a perfect harmonization to the C and E's held by the chorus. Elsewhere in the opera, Manrico never goes above an A, except for a couple of optional B flats. Fact is that tenor voices were generally lighter in the early Italian ottocento, and the belted high C one hears at the end of Act Three in Trovatore really distorts Verdi's intent, even if he eventually gave in on the one occasion dirac quotes.

Thanks to you, carbro. Re soloists vs. principals: I sometimes find the principals (not so much at ABT, but at least at NYCB) not nearly as interesting as the soloists or corps members. Re program notes: I'm aware of those stapled notes. But they look pretty unprofessional for a company of this calibre, and I doubt all audience members know to pick them up.

Jennifer Dunning's review has already appeared in The Times, Tobi Tobias has weighed in on line, and Kristin Sloan has posted an enthusiastic response on The Winger complete with photos. So I assume anyone interested can go to both those places for the basics and I'll dig in with what I have to say here. I went on the first night, Wednesday, and there was apparently a good deal of enthusiasm among the audience. At least there was a standing ovation, though that sort of thing is so commonplace in NY these days that I don't take it to mean much. I stood too during the calls, but mainly because I couldn't see the stage for the people standing in front of me, and because I wanted to stretch my legs. The most basic facts of the Thomas Mann story from 1911 were preserved, with the obvious exception that Aschenbach was transformed into a choreographer rather than a writer. This made good enough sense in the context of a ballet, and at the start we see a creatively frustrated Aschenbach struggling to create his masterpiece on the life of Frederick the Great of Prussia, suitably accompanied by Bach's Musical Offering. I assume this is partly intended tongue in cheek - a repressed creator trying to work with impossibly unballetic material. (In the Visconti movie Aschenbach became a composer, as there is reason to believe Mann modeled Aschenbach on Mahler, and the adagietto from Mahler's 5th symphony threads its way throughout his very lush movie version.) In other aspects Neumeier also follows the Mann original - the extremely disciplined Aschenbach, frustrated with work and in need of change, journeys from the cold North to the sultry climate of Venice, falls in love with an exquisite young man, and dies there while Venice is undergoing a cholera epidemic. But other than that, a lot changes between novella and ballet, and I'm not sure it's for the better. In fact I'm pretty sure it's not, and re-reading the novella a few days ago just confirmed my impression. Neumeier subtitles his ballet "a free adaptation," which of course is his prerogative, but to the degree that he departs from Mann, is he producing something of comparable richness, or has he diminished the resonance of the story? Take first the crucial matter of age. In Mann, Aschenbach is described as elderly, graying, and at least 50 but probably much older; Tadzio is about 14 - a well-bred, beautiful but delicate boy with grey eyes and honey-colored ringlets, just old enough to be incipiently sexual but not much beyond a child. Visconti came close to capturing Tadzio in the teenage boy he cast for his movie, though even there the actor looked a bit too old. Mann himself admitted the novella concerned "a case of pederasty." After nearly 100 years, it is more disturbing to imagine a 65-year old man infatuated with a 14-year old boy than a 40-year-old interested in a well-built athlete of about 20. And yet the latter is what Neumeier gives us. The age disparity in Mann is essential to both Aschenbach's idealization of Tadzio as an incarnation of youthful, ambiguously innocent beauty and the feelings of degradation and danger he experiences in vain pursuit of this exquisite creature. The environment of Venice, at once sensuous and debased, both a fairy-tale and a nightmarish vision of a city in the grips of a covered-up plague, is the symbolic representation of Aschenbach's internal struggle and his ultimate capitulation to sensual depravity. The barber scene in Mann, where Aschenbach attempts to regain his appearance as a young man, has little meaning if Aschenbach looks (as does Lloyd Riggins, born in 1969) little older than 40. With Neumeier, the cholera epidemic so essential in Mann feels just tacked onto the action, with black-hooded figures hauling the occasional dead body slowly across the stage, but having no relation to Aschenbach's internal ferment. Instead of the richness of characterization and allusion found throughout the novella, we get little more in the ballet than a closeted gay man falling for a healthy young hunk in a red Speedo, struggling with coming out, and then dying for no good reason after their final pas de deux. Equally important, in the novella Aschenbach and Tadzio never meet or exchange words, although there is the occasional suggestion of an unspoken rapport between the two. In Mann we are never given the boy's point-of-view or allowed into his consciousness. He is after all more symbol than actual character. Yet in the ballet the younger and older man toss a soccer ball a few times, and dance a couple of pas de deux, thus largely vitiating the terror Mann's Aschenbach feels of being discovered and descending into an abyss of uncontrolled passion for an unattainable object. Dunning even interprets the Tadzio of the ballet as initiating the older man into sexual love: "Edvin Revazov's Tadzio is a wonder, a perfect mix of luminous innocence and easy, unthinking sensuality. He is the child leading the father, with reassuring, bashful kindness, into a tumultuous new world." So what we're getting in Neumeier is the kid who's been around the block a few times deflowering the older virgin. Anything farther from the spirit of Mann's Tadzio cannot be imagined. Neumeier's Death In Venice is a largely sexual reading of a novella whose homosexual overtones are so strong that some readers have been as impelled to deny them as fiercely as other readers have denied the homosexual longings in Shakespeare's sonnets. But like the sonnets, the original work is much more than that. Neumeier's ballet of sexual self-discovery and frankness is moving and beautiful in its own way, but it lacks the disturbing richness of the original, with its quasi-Platonic meditations on the relations between art, beauty, discipline, and depravity. Other things I found odd - the use of two identically costumed dancers to portray the sinister figure (red-headed in Mann) who pops up a half-dozen times in the story, as a gondolier, an entertainer, and more. Yes, I know the Hamburg company had identical twins at one time, but the casting still begs the question. I don't understand the need for the intrusive figure of the pianist either. Using Bach to represent discipline and Wagner for eroticism is plausible, but why have such sensuous music as the Tristan Prelude and Liebestod banged on the piano (rather insensitively by one Elizabeth Cooper), when we hear orchestrated versions of the Tannhäuser Bacchanale and the Bach Ricercare? Even the program booklet had its oddities, though I much appreciated the fact that all the musical choices were listed in detail, a practice I wish NYCB would follow. (The Wagner selections included music from the two operas listed above as well as some lesser-known non-operatic pieces.) But the Who's Who section provided detailed biographies of all principals and soloists in the Hamburg Ballet, several of whom did not appear at BAM, while not even mentioning anyone from the corps including young Mr. Revazov, who had the second major part in the ballet we saw. Not very fair especially to this interesting dancer, and just another strange element of a very strange night.

(Post deleted by Klavier.)

Just came back, but it's too late to write anything now and I want to think about it a bit more (and re-read the Thomas Mann novella).

Good news for the dancers at least in the larger companies, not so good for those in smaller ones. I don't endorse the inflated pay given to sports stars and movie actors either. Another issue is the longevity of a dancer's career. However well or ill they are paid now, they cannot expect to continue past a certain age, and must look for other ways to make a living. Would you be able to estimate the average annual compensation a dancer at NYCB can be expected to receive in each of the three main ranks, vs. the compensation at a smaller company? If this is too OT by now, perhaps another thread would be in order.