volcanohunter

I also think opera is closer to film or plays b/c the singers act and "speak" (sing actually), so ever since the advent of supertitles above the stage (which was VERY controversial years ago) people understand everything and less people are "afraid" of opera. Of course, it could be argued that ballet dancers act and "speak" (mime), so maybe I am wrong.

Last summer I took a young cousin to see his first ballet, the POB's Giselle. He'd previously been to the opera quite a few times, his parents being committed Wagnerites, but he claimed to have preferred the ballet. (He said this not to me but to his horrified parents.) He cited not having to read titles as one of the reasons for enjoying ballet more.

Can anyone shed light on the economics of the opera vs. the ballet? The ballet was a touring cash cow, especially after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and kept the company afloat long enough to be rescued. The opera tours, but not nearly as much as the ballet, and the top singers at the Mariinsky are much more likely to spend extended periods outside Russia, at the Met, Paris Opera, Covent Garden, etc.

Gergiev courts ballet donors actively: are they that taken by Gergiev that they don't care if the ballet is neglected, or do they not realize the ballet is neglected because the brand is so strong?

Even Gergiev must realize that the ballet brand is much stronger, including domestically. In St. Petersburg tickets to ballet performances are generally more expensive than those to the opera.

Orchestra seats at the main theater: Swan Lake - 7,000 RUB ($225); Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker - 6,000; The Fountain of Bakhchesarai - 4,300; Pique Dame - 3,840; Don Quixote, Ruslan & Liudmila, Il trittico, Le nozze di Figaro, Faust, Evgeni Onegin - 3,200; Carmen - 2,560

Orchestra seats at the new theater: Jewels - 5,300 RUB; Bolero/Symphony in C - 5,000; Prodigal Son/Rite of Spring - 4,300; Un ballo in maschera - 3,800; Apollo+, Iolanta, Il trovatore, Tosca, Rusalka - 3,200

Exceptions would be opera performances with international stars, for example, a main-stage performance of Nabucco with Placido Domingo and Maria Guleghina for 10,000 RUB or a new-stage performance of Iolanta with Anna Netrebko for 8,000 (vs. 3,200 without her).

At the Bolshoi, the difference is even more pronounced.

Main theater orchestra: Swan Lake, Spartacus - 12,000 RUB ($385); La Bayadere - 10,000; Giselle (Grigorovich), Jewels - 9,000; Romeo & Juliet (Grigorovich) - 8,000; Onegin (ballet) - 7,000; Prince Igor, Turandot, Der Rosenkavalier - 4,000

New theater orchestra: Romeo & Juliet (Stuttgart Ballet) - 8,000 RUB; Rite of Spring (Finnish National Ballet) - 6,300; Giselle (Vasiliev) - 4,000; La Sylphide, Flames of Paris, Anyuta, Ek/Baganova - 3,000; Evgeni Onegin (opera), La sonnambula - 2,000; Die Zauberflote, Nabucco, Iolanta, Le Coq d'or - 1,200

This is completely different from our experience in the West, where opera tickets are generally more expensive than ballet tickets, presumably because opera singers are paid a good deal more than ballet dancers. At the Paris Opera the top-price tickets to the opera, regardless of work or house, cost 180€, while the top-price ticket to the ballet is 92€. Top tickets to forthcoming operas at Covent Garden range from £150 to £225 depending on the opera, while the Royal Ballet maxes out at £93, with the Bolshoi fetching higher prices (£110-120). At the Met a weeknight orchestra seat for Die Walkure costs $350 and Rigoletto costs $370, while a weekday performance of Don Quixote by ABT, with its fancy-pants dynamic pricing, costs $95 for Part/Whiteside, $110 for Semionova/Stearns and $140 for Osipova/Vasiliev.

In fairness, it's like that everywhere. Opposing attorneys wrangling for stiffer or more lenient charges is part of the process. Intent matters, but so does the degree to which a plot succeeds. There will be differing levels of punishment depending on whether someone succeeds in depriving another person of his life, his arm or his finger. In this case the maximum degree of punishment would apply if Filin were completely blinded and/or severely disfigured, and a somewhat milder sentence would be applied if he were not completely blinded or permanently disfigured, though there would be jail time in either case.

Me too!

Dates for the POB are Monday, December 16, for Sleeping Beauty and Tuesday, June 3, for Balanchine/Millepied.

http://www.fraprod.fr/offres_cinema.php?prog=2

There was a preliminary Facebook posting today indicating that next season the POB would be showing The Sleeping Beauty (December) and the double bill of Balanchine's Le Palais de Cristal (costumes by Christian Lacroix) and Benjamin Millepied's Daphnis and Chloe (May/June).

That's not very much.

https://www.facebook.com/UGCvivalopera

Olga Smirnova's Swan Lake debut is scheduled for May 16.

http://www.bolshoi.ru/en/performances/36/roles/#20130516190000

My understanding was that Pronin himself turned down the acting director job, arguing that it should be filled by someone of greater artistic stature. Perhaps he should have taken it.

http://izvestia.ru/news/543379

I guess the next investigation will be to find out what went wrong in the once-close relationship between Filin and Pronin.

I also went to see it, because it had been one of my favorite Bolshoi broadcasts, and enjoyed it more the second time around. I have to admit to having something of a love-hate relationship with the dancing of Maria Alexandrova, something I can never quite shake. But on second viewing I was prepared for what had bothered me initially (the lack of delicacy and lyricism) and could focus exclusively on her strengths (the speed and amplitude). I had no such reservations about the other dancers. I thought my companion's observations after the Grand Pas de Corbeilles was quite apt: that Ekaterina Krysanova was like a ballistic missile, while Ruslan Skvortsov was like a stealth airplane. As always, Denis Savin was adorable, though Alexei Loparevich was strangely monochromatic. Act 2 in particular is a wall-to-wall dancing feast. That Vyacheslav Lopatin's Acteon was fabulous was a given, but I also enjoyed Anastasia Stashkevich, whose dancing I sometimes find a little brittle.

The music is not especially memorable, though I think it's better than what Pugni composed for The Pharaoh's Daughter, for example. The production itself is fabulous looking, and I agree that this performance was shot well. We need more of these reconstructions. The Bolshoi needs them, too. For one thing, it's already run out of 19th-century repertoire to broadcast to its international movie audiences.

"I am happy with the relationship that I currently have with them. I arrive, I dance at the Met, and I leave."

Pardon me for putting it this crudely, but that formulation does sound a little "wham, bam, thank you, ma'am."

Given the public outcry, the Ukrainian prime minister has said the situation will be investigated by the Ministry of Culture and "well-known authoritative professionals in this field."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ukrainian/entertainment/2013/04/130412_kyiv_balley_scandal_az.shtml

Cristian, remember that Carlos Acosta will be at the Coliseum at the same time.

http://www.sadlerswells.com/show/Carlos-Acosta-Classical-Selection

What a loss. Truly a national treasure. Requiescat in pace, Maria Tallchief.

I fear that 3D is inherently cheesy.

I would like to ask the opinion of those who have seen ballet in 3D, because I have not yet seen such a thing. I did see a couple of operas filmed in 3D at the Royal Opera House, and there was an exceedingly strange effect that could really hamper a dance performance. When a shot was taken from a downstage corner camera, you would expect people standing closest to the camera to look very large. Instead they looked like microcephalic midgets. I'm guessing it was some sort of misguided overcompensation, but it was extremely disconcerting to see such a bizarre change in a performer's proportions. Has anyone noticed this in the Mariinsky's 3D ballets?

If Matvienko hadn't thought of it himself, I'm sure Tsiskaridze advised him to consult a lawyer. But it appears that Matvienko isn't interested in working under the same roof with the theater's general director and its personnel manager. I don't know whether he'd be willing to take a legal battle far enough to try to unseat the current management. Tsiskaridze has been trying for years, and he still hasn't succeeded.

In these circumstances administrators have all sorts of levers of influence, but ultimately they lose the war. Rudolf Bing may have won his battle with Maria Callas, but can anyone honestly say that the Metropolitan Opera was better off for having the most iconic diva of the 20th century give only 20 performances on its stage? Obviously, Matvienko isn't Callas, but my point is that in battles between artists and administrators, the audiences is usually the ultimate loser.

The 3D Swan Lake that never materialized on Valentine's Day has been rescheduled for June 6. Note that the trailer states "captured live" rather than "live." And no, I don't know why the trailer begins with Sleeping Beauty references.

This episode of "Ticket to the Bolshoi" begins with a story on the 60th anniversary of Marina Kondratieva's work at the theater. In it you can see a tiny bit of Smirnova rehearsing Odette, starting at about 7:21.

Yes.

It would be nice of Beloserkovsky could be persuaded to take the job, though I've heard him say that he feels like a thorough New Yorker and wouldn't be inclined to live anywhere else. Another possibility would be Ivan Putrov. His parents still live in Kiev, he returns from time to time to perform at the opera house where they were once dancers, he's underemployed at present, and he could potentially expand the company's repertoire in a Royal Ballet direction.

If I had been in Matvienko's position, I would have directed my attentions somewhere other than Class Concert. There probably is some basis for believing that he was too much of an absentee director. In a television interview on Monday he couldn't remember the name of his successor, only that she had a Georgian surname starting with an R. This despite the fact that his company had performed her ballets seven times since November. I couldn't help wonder whether he'd seen them.

In this case, I suspect the theater's general director is being fundamentally dishonest. He complains that a double bill of Edward Clug ballets is performed to recorded music, and that this is incompatible with an "academic" theater, while failing to mention that a couple of months ago Matvienko also brought in Makarova's La Bayadère, which, obviously, is accompanied by a full orchestra. The Minister of Culture, who is new to his post, "has been informed" that Matvienko has failed to stage a single new production, when in addition to the Klug double bill and Bayadère the company has acquired a new full-evening ballet by former director Viktor Lytvynov, a new full-evening program by Radu Poklitaru (performed by his own company, the Kiev Modern Ballet, mind you) and revivals of several other ballets, including the somewhat hoary Class Concert. But apparently the problem is that Matvienko himself did not do the staging, which allows the general director to tell the poorly informed minister that Matvienko hasn't done anything.

This is phenomenally hypocritical, because at the beginning of the last season, the National Opera announced that the forthcoming season would see new productions of Don Carlo, Otello, Samson et Dalila, Die Zauberflöte and Król Roger. A new Don Carlo appeared only in late spring, an opera already in the repertoire was given a revival, there was a single concert performance of Król Roger and the other operas never materialized. As far as I can see, the opera company has not mounted a single new production this season, but Matvienko is accused of doing nothing because he did not act as choreographer or producer of any of the ballet company's five new productions during his "unofficial" tenure.

Then there is the matter of Matvienko's appointed successor Aniko Rekhviashvili, whose experience with classical ballet seems to be a little tenuous. Her bio states that she studied at the studio of the Virsky National Folk Dance Ensemble of Ukraine. No shame in that. Irina Dvorovenko's parents were Virsky dancers, and Leonid Sarafanov is descended from two generations of Virsky dancers. The bio gives no information about what sort of performing experience Rekhviashvili had subsequently. Then she apparently graduated from the Kiev Institute of Culture, and that sets off alarm bells for me. In the old days, it had a reputation as the place where the untalented children of illustrious artists went to study because no connections or bribes could get them into "real" schools like the Conservatory, the ballet or folk dance divisions of the Choreographic School, the theater or film faculties of the Theatrical Institute, the Institute of Visual Art or the Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts. The Institute of Culture primarily produced teachers who would work in extracurricular settings leading choirs, dance ensembles and drama groups. More recently the Institute has been grandiosely renamed the National University of Culture and the Arts, though National University of Show Business would be more appropriate. In addition to its previous functions, it's now also known as the place where pop stars go to get a degree (in pop music, of course), and has been augmented with departments of fashion, design and advertising, film and television technology, IT, and even hotel, tourism and restaurant business. The dance department includes departments of classical choreography, folk choreography, ballroom dance choreography and contemporary choreography (whose faculty includes Poklitaru). But the tone for the whole place is set by its director Mykhailo Poplavsky, a.k.a. the Singing Rector, not because he had previous experience as a musician, but rather because after spending so much time in the presence of real and budding pop stars, he decided to become one himself. Frankly, he is a figure so absurd that a Ukrainian television program recently gave him the "screaming goat" treatment.

Fairly or not, Rekhviashvili is going to carry the Poplavsky taint because she worked at his university for many years. She has staged a couple of full-lengths ballets for the National Opera, and they seem to be classical in nature, stultifyingly so.

But it's like Tsiskaridze said, if he'd never heard of her, neither has anyone else, and such an appointment seems unlikely to do much for the reputation of a troupe of 150 dancers.

Finally, Ardani Artists has gotten in on the act, stating that if Matvienko leaves the opera house, the Kings of the Dance will stop coming to Kiev. Make of that what you will.

http://gazeta.ua/art...danilyan/492037

This makes the announcement a few days ago that he is filling three of the Hallberg/TBA slots all the more interesting (the Don Q with Murphy + 2 Corsaires).

He does not lack for work. On April 13 he will perform in Swan Lake with Nina Ananiashvili in Tbilisi, and on April 27 he will dance Spartacus as the Bolshoi.

The social media person for the opera house is decidedly not onside with the decision. For the past three days the Facebook page and Twitter feed of the National Opera of Ukraine has been updated with pro-Matvienko press material and quotes from angry dancers. Its Facebook poll asking whether users agree with the decision shows 97% opposed. Mind you, as of about two hours ago the Facebook page is now described as "unofficial" but up to this point it has been posting casting updates, conducting contests for free tickets, and the like.

Nikolai Tsiskaridze was in Kiev yesterday performing, and now he's speaking out in Matvienko's favor.

The Royal Ballet would have been limited in its ability to hire Makarova because at the time membership in the company was restricted to British nationals and citizens of the Commonwealth. Nureyev was never especially happy that he was always a "guest artist" with the company, but it was the only possible solution at the time. In 1980 EEC rules forced the company to open up its hiring practices, and the first foreigner hired under the new scheme was Alessandra Ferri. Many others followed, of course, but whether this was a good thing for the Royal Ballet and its style is another matter. Now, as is well known, most of the RB's principals are not British, and following the retirement of Leanne Benjamin, Steven McRae will be alone in carrying the banner for the "colonials."

Opening the audition process to foreigners does not necessarily mean that a company will be overrun by outsiders, obviously. The Paris Opera Ballet is also required to open its auditions to EU citizens (and makes them open to others as well), but it continues to hire primarily French dancers.

Finally, as pointed out in another thread, Tsiskaridze is no longer cast to dance in the summer Bolshoi tour to London in spite of being originally listed as dancing. I think an explanation to the London fans is in order.

On this score I think the Bolshoi may actually be doing him a favor, because, to put it kindly, Tsiskaridze's performances now have a quality of, shall we say, high camp.

https://www.youtube....h?v=rXlDiLoi4nw

It is worth noting that Anzhelina Vorontsova has not been cast for anything on the tour, even though the casting lists not only principal characters but also the names of dancers who will be appearing as Aurora's Friends or in the ensemble of "Emeralds." Perhaps she does not wish to travel while Dmitrichenko is in police custody. Tsiskardize's other pupil Denis Rodkin will be going, and in light of Dmitrichenko's arrest and the current paucity of interpreters of the role, Rodkin will be making his debut as Spartacus in a couple of weeks.

And Batyr Annadurdyev, who was in the alleged "stake-out" car with Dmitrichenko on the night of the attack, and who submitted his resignation following a heated telephone conversation with Filin, has since withdrawn his resignation and is going to London, too.

I did notice that in the television interview above Tsiskaridze tried to distance Vorontsova from Dmitrichenko a bit, stating, when asked to clarify, that she is Dmitrichenko's girlfriend, not his common-law wife. Dmitrichenko's father, in the meantime, has stated on television that he and his wife regard Vorontsova as their son's fiancée.

The Royal Opera House has posted extremely detailed casting lists for everything except Swan Lake, which I expect the webmasters simply haven't finished yet. No doubt a good chunk will be reshuffled by the time the season starts, but as noted there have been changes since the initial announcements in January:

The Osipova/Vasiliev Flames of Paris is close of sold out already.

http://www.roh.org.uk/about/bolshoi

Olga Smirnova has not done an Odette-Odile yet. She may yet make her debut in May before performing the part in London.