volcanohunter

How very sad it is to hear about this. When the Australian Ballet visited the Met in 1990, he performed Albrecht in Giselle and Crassus in Spartacus. Unfortunately, I didn't see either of those performances, but I was very favourably impressed by his musical responsiveness in the company's film of The Sleeping Beauty. His vision scene is particularly excellent. May he rest in peace.

Many subscription packages have become more flexible anyway, allowing subscribers to exchange tickets to a performance they're not able (or don't want) to attend. I wouldn't be at all suprised if this has resulted in reduced attendance at ballets, operas and concerts that could be considered box-office poison. On the other hand, it's allowed me to avoid the more populist programming that performing arts organizations resort to in order to fill seats.

This may be a long shot, but if he was bare-chested and wearing red tights, it could be Le Spectre de la Rose. In that case, the DVD you'd want is Baryshnikov Live at Wolf Trap.

I may be decades away from my government pension, but I guess you can now officially classify me as an old fogey. If this is the direction ballet is headed, I don't particularly care for it. I guess you really can be too thin, too long-legged and too banana-arched. What I saw was a group of women so preoccupied with the point of their feet and height their extensions, regardless of how they distort their torsos, that they've lost the ability to jump or connect steps. Novikova did nothing for me in any of her solos, and in the grand pas de deux in particular there seemed to be no build-up to anything; her solo just petered out. In fairness, she wasn't helped by torso-up close-ups, or the camera angles. There were altogether too many from the downstage diagonals. Admittedly, this is what people in boxes close to the stage see, but the croisés and effacés in the choreography were lost. Sarafanov is a technical wiz, but there wasn't much personality on display. Sadly, the whole performance struck me as flat, and it wasn't helped by the overexposed lighting. What a pity. I expected a lot from this disc.

Patricia McBride. This is a dreadful confession to make, but as a young kid I didn't really "get" Susan Farrell, whereas McBride was the sort of firecracker I had no trouble grasping. Of course, Farrell did hit me like a typhoon when I was about 16, and I still haven't recovered.

The National Ballet of Canada does have Cranko's Romeo and Juliet, Onegin and The Taming of the Shrew in its repertoire, though perhaps it doesn't perform them as often as Reilly would like. It's probably been ages since the company performed Pineapple Poll. In fact, thanks to Paquita's reference to Karen Kain on the cover of a women's magazine, I just noticed that Onegin, which will be performed in June, is being redesigned by Santo Loquasto. I hope the company isn't on the verge of making a terrible mistake. Susan Benson's redesign of Romeo and Juliet was a disaster. Would it be too much to hope that the company's massive deficit could scupper this move?

They're removed his name from the list of principal dancers on their web site, but there's been no press release, and the Canadian press hasn't published anything yet, no doubt, because they're unaware.

I wonder whether this will change under the conditions of their new license. Are listener-supported stations even allowed to play that many ads?

Marga, perhaps you'd be able to comment on how Toronto's Classical FM fared when it changed ownership. I don't live in Toronto, and 96.3 FM isn't included in my satellite TV package--Montreal's Radio-Classique is--but I have to admit that I felt some trepidation when I learned that Moses Znaimer had bought the station. I was afraid it would deteriorate the same way Bravo had, as is changed from a supposed arts channel into a depository for Law & Order re-runs. That was a deterioration that Znaimer, apparently, did little to stop. (I have to admit that Bravo has improved ever so slightly since it was bought by CTV.) It's interesting that you felt this way toward the radio hosts. (I'm glad you do, given that I'm a radio announcer myself!) Several years ago the employees of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation went on strike, so programming on its FM channel, which has since jettisoned most of its classical music programming, consisted of wall-to-wall classical music. I loved it. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's self-important radio hosts in love with the sound of their own voices. (It's why I aim to talk as little on the air as humanly possible.) Honestly, I was sorry when the talking resumed.

Oh, dear. And the National Ballet of Canada had posted his bio on its web site and so forth. http://www.ballet.ca/thecompany/principals/jason_reilly.php

I know what you mean. I've amassed so many CDs over the past 23 years that I don't have enough time to listen to them all, let alone keep up with all the stuff on the internet. Of course I often need to content myself with listening to rather than watching web feeds, but I'm grateful to those opera houses, concert halls and festivals that recognize the value in making their performances available to any and all that are interested. I don't know whether they gain anything financially by doing so, but I give them credit for being propagandists for the arts.

The performance is available on demand and free of charge until September 30 by clicking on the Verbier tab at the bottom of the medici.tv page. However, the system will require you to create a user account and/or sign in.

I missed this interview when it aired on DW-TV, but back in May Malakhov was a guest on Talking Germany. Unfortunately, the performance clips have been edited out, but the interview itself is linked at the bottom of the page. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4227964,00.html

Since it's relevant, a couple of weeks ago Annette Dasch was a guest on DW-TV's Talking Germany. The link below includes an edited version of the TV interview (in English). http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4417780,00.html

At 1:00 p.m. ET, Medici TV began broadcasting a live web feed of a concert performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni from the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. The cast features Bryn Terfel (Don Giovanni), René Pape (Leporello), Anna Samuil (Donna Anna), Michael Schade (Don Ottavio), Annette Dasch (Donna Elvira), Sylvia Schwartz (Zerlina), Robert Gleadow (Masetto) and Thomas Quasthoff (the Commendatore). Manfred Honeck is conducting. http://www.medici.tv

It never even occurred to me that a company as large as City Ballet would have a single company class. When I visited some opera houses in the waning days of the Soviet Union, what struck me was the strongly hierarchical structure of the ballet companies, which extended to class. Principals and soloists would take class first, and dancers deemed soloist material seemed to be placed in this class almost immediately, and after them the corps would come and do their class. Furthermore, other teachers would lead additional classes simultaneously, for example, a mixed-rank class for women only or an analogous class for men. Certainly there was nothing free-for-all or social-hour about any of them. Granted these companies were even larger than NYCB, but I can't imagine 70-80 dancers in class at the same time.

Is it really Gelb? I'm no longer a resident of New York so perhaps I'm misinformed, but it seems to me that apart from the Bolshoi and Mariinsky, there haven't been any visiting ballet companies at the Met for years. I'd have to go back to my childhood and teen years to recall visits from the Royal, POB, RDB and others.

The second disc includes a 53-minute documentary. There is no rehearsal footage, but as with the POB's previous releases of Jewels and Cinderella, interviews are interspersed with clips from the performance. In this case the interviewees are John Neumeier, Brigitte Lefèvre, Agnès Letestu, Stéphane Bullion, Delphine Moussin, José Martinez, Dorothée Gilbert, pianist Emmanuel Strosser and wardrobe manager Dominique Gay. Subtitles are available in English (excluding Neumeier), French (Neumeier only), German, Spanish and Italian.

It's hardly new, but the Pacific Northwest Ballet's A Midsummer Night's Dream will be screening at Canadian cinemas on Saturday, August 15. It will screen at Empire Theatres in Fredericton, Saint John, Moncton, St. John's, Halifax, Sydney, Charlottetown, Bolton, Kingston, Kitchener, London, Mississauga, North York, Ottawa, Richmond Hill, St. Catharines, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, North Vancouver and Victoria at 11:00 a.m. local time. It will also be screened at Landmark Cinemas in Winnipeg, Calgary, Kelowna and Nanaimo at 11:00 a.m. local time, at the Princess Twin in Waterloo at 1:00 p.m., and at the Ridge Theatre in Vancouver at 10:00 a.m. July 25 & 26 - The Last Night of the Proms 2008 (BBC Symphony Orchestra) August 15 - A Midsummer Night's Dream (Pacific Northwest Ballet) August 29 & 30 - La traviata (Royal Opera)

It was produced eleven years ago, but Classical TV has posted this BBC profile of Darcey Bussell. It's about an hour long and is divided into two parts. At the conclusion of the first part, you should get a station ID, followed by the second half of the program. http://www.classicaltv.com/video/166/darce...ssell-a-profile Apropos the BT discussion about the glamour ladies of ballet, the program brings up all sorts of issues about ballerina image.

This is a link to a brief television interview with Mathias Heymann, including some performance footage from La Fille mal gardée. http://tf1.lci.fr/infos/culture/0,,4464318...s-heymann-.html

Is she going to be a sit-down guest or will she be performing a piece? For example, three years ago Peter Mattei, Diana Damrau, Juan Diego Florez, John Del Carlo and Samuel Ramey performed an abbreviated version of the Act 1 finale from 'The Barber of Seville' on the Letterman show. http://archives.metoperafamily.org/archive...t.w?xCID=351638

The Hamburg Ballet has posted a trailer for its 'Hommage aux Ballets Russes' program. It includes clips from Balanchine's Prodigal Son, featuring 20-year-old corps member Alexandr Trusch as the Prodigal and Hélène Bouchet as the Siren, John Neumeier's new Le Pavillon d'Armide, and Millicent Hodson's reconstruction of Nijinsky's Rite of Spring, with Silvia Azzoni as the Chosen One. http://www.hamburgballett.de/video/hommage.html To my mind, Alexandre Riabko's resemblance to John Singer Sargent's charcoal drawing of Nijinsky in Pavillon is eerie. http://cgfa.dotsrc.org/sargent/sargen29.jpg

This DVD has been off the American market for some time. If you're dying to see it, but don't want to pay $250 for a new copy via Amazon, it's just appeared on site of the Berkshire Record Outlet for $20. The BRO code number is 142202. Or search for 'Swan Lake' and it should be the first title to pop up. http://www.berkshirerecordoutlet.com/searc...&filter=all

Fortunately, this particular opera isn't that long, only 90 minutes or so, followed by a few minutes of ovations for the singers--and