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volcanohunter

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Everything posted by volcanohunter

  1. In the most recent City Ballet podcast Ratmansky mentioned that his Coppélia will be original choreography, not a reconstruction. https://podcast.nycballet.com/episode-95-new-combinations-alexei-ratmansky
  2. On Saturday, September 16, at 19:00 CEST/1:00 pm Eastern, the Vienna State Ballet will livestream the Nureyev production of Don Quixote, with Liudmila Konovalova and Davide Dato. The stream is free-of-charge, but logging in is required. Registration requires only a name and email. Traditionally streams from the Vienna State Opera have been available on demand for 72 hours. https://play.wiener-staatsoper.at/event/ee11d96d-aa75-4350-b445-0402d8cb7f44
  3. Woolf Works has just been added to ROH Stream. https://www.roh.org.uk/tickets-and-events/woolf-works-2017-digital
  4. A presenter that specializes in galas needs a corps to do a Nutcracker. I wonder how it's going to be sourced.
  5. On the eve of the company’s 75th anniversary season, I'd say the musicians' bargaining position is very strong.
  6. Particularly since the story is set in Ukraine.
  7. Amber Scott (my favorite dancer at the Australian Ballet) is retiring from the stage on 30 September in Swan Lake, after 22 years with the company. Sadly, I don't remember her appearing in any of the company’s recent livestreams, and it looks like her performance in Swan Lake won't be streamed either, since that is taking place on the 29th. I am very sorry I had so few opportunities to see her dance, and I'm even more sorry there won't be any more. I found her to be magical. https://australianballet.com.au/blog/the-last-act-amber-scott-prepares-for-her-final-bow
  8. Tyler Angle's head has been discussed previously on the board. There are a few ways that dancers deal with thinning hair. One method is to darken the scalp underneath thinning hair to make it appear thicker. Angle used to do this, but the technique is most successful when a dancer's hairline is more or less intact (e.g., Alexandre Riabko of the Hamburg Ballet). The Bolshoi's Vyacheslav Lopatin wears a toupée in some roles, when he is supposed to appear especially young. But most of the time he performs with his conspicuously receding hairline. Johan Kobborg always wore a toupée on stage and didn't start going around bald until after he left the Royal Ballet. Even now in photos he is usually seen wearing a cap or hat. The Royal Danish Ballet's Jonathan Chmelensky wears a wig in narrative and tutu ballets. That includes, for example, Ballo della Regina, which the company streamed during the pandemic. But in contemporary repertoire he goes without the wig. Former Royal Winnipeg Ballet soloist Alexander Gamayunov also had a danseur wig for narrative and tutu ballets, though not all narrative ballets required it, and he pulled off a shaved head especially well. At the moment I'd say that Angle's most conspicuous problem is his fitness, and some costumes are particularly unforgiving.
  9. Patricia Neary, the original Tall Girl, is indeed tall. I have seen the role performed by dancers who are not tall, but the interaction with the quartet of men was less effective. There are many female dancers for whom it is difficult to find partners because they are well over six feet tall on pointe. I'm inclined to leave partnerless roles such as the Tall Girl for them to dance. They are shut out of many other roles.
  10. @SusanB: Apparently Amazon has mp3 versions on sale. Vienna Radio Orchestra: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HJFBLQX/ National Philharmonic Orchestra: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B073LVZB6G/ New and used CDs are also available from third-party sellers.
  11. The one time I saw Kochetkova with ABT she was dancing opposite Sarafanov, filling in, I think, for Osipova. I remember liking her more than most Russian ballerinas. The six-o'clock extensions were grotesque, but she was less mannered than most of her compatriots and didn't drag behind the music.
  12. Perhaps the assumption was ABT audiences demanded Russian ballerinas, and Kochetkova was closer and presumably didn't require a work visa, so she was less of a hassle. She did have a large following online and was very popular in San Francisco. But that sort of thing doesn't always translate to another city or country. Conversely, José Manuel Carreño proved to be far more popular in New York than he'd ever been in London.
  13. Since a larger number of in-house dancers now get a chance to perform principal roles, I'd call that a victory for them.
  14. Unfortunately, at present ABT cannot find a way to sell 3,800 tickets per show. For the most part neither can the Metropolitan Opera, though of course it presents many more performances. NEA surveys have shown that about 3% of adults in the U.S. attend a ballet performance annually (p. 31), and on average those 3% attend 1.5 performances each (p. 43). That was in 2017. I shudder to think what the numbers are post-pandemic. The obstacles are daunting. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts_ParticipationRevised.pdf
  15. In those days the Met was heavily subscribed. I remember my aunt's annual ritual of choosing the subscription package with the fewest operas/singers she didn't want to see. Locally, the season at the main theater complex was 100% subscribed a few decades ago. Make-your-own packages and ticket exchanges were unthinkable not that long ago. Over the past 20 years, though, the audience has been tanking.
  16. I'm guessing regional companies don't rely on tourists, whereas Broadway and the Met struggle mightily in their absence.
  17. But in Canada it's a perfectly ordinary weekend. When the NBoC last performed Onegin 7 years ago, there was a conflict on the last Sunday with the Grey Cup final, which was played in Toronto that year, and the city was a bit of a zoo, fans from Calgary and Ottawa overrunning the place. (The climate being what it is, the Canadian football season runs from June to November.) This year, though,the Grey Cup will be played the previous weekend in Hamilton, which is about an hour's drive away, but has its own airport. Conveniently, the Toronto Maple Leafs will be on the road that week, so no influx of hockey fans either, though there will be an NBA game on the 24th. Onegin is never a monster hit in Toronto. The last time around there were also only six show, there was no Thursday matinee, and as best as I can recall, the top ring remained closed for all performances.
  18. Yes, in 2014 a large chunk of the Bolshoi visited New York with Swan Lake, Spartacus and Don Quixote. In 2017 it participated in the 50th anniversary of Jewels with NYCB and POB, and did The Taming of the Shrew on its own, complete with weak ticket sales. I can understand some people wanting to get Nutcrackers out of their systems, but I'm not sure a MacMillan death fest in the bleak days of February would be a guaranteed hit.
  19. I can only conclude that ABT didn't jump at the chance to turn Romeo and Juliet into a February classic because it crunched the numbers and decided the audience wasn't there. Perhaps it even looked at NYCB's ticket sales for February and decided that head-to-head competition would end badly. P.S. Since I now come to New York as a visitor, I am sorry there is no opera in February, just as I am sorry that NYCB and ABT no longer have concurrent performances in spring. But those organizations aren't programming their seasons for the likes of me.
  20. The Metropolitan Opera decided to stop performances in February because it was the worst patch for ticket sales. (Plus it's when singers are most likely to be sick and in need of last-minute replacements.) "The Met will shift performances from February, traditionally a period when less people attend the opera, to later in the spring, a period more appealing to audiences. Instead of concluding in mid-May, future seasons will end in mid-June." https://www.metopera.org/about/press-releases/met-opera-and-union-groups-reach-ground-breaking-agreement-to-allow-sunday-matinee-performances/ Is there any reason to think ABT would do better box office? The other day The New Yorker ran a piece about the demise of summer programming at Lincoln Center. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/requiem-for-mostly-mozart As FauxPas pointed it, the practice of wall-to-wall foreign visitors at the Met in July ended a long time ago. (It had been one of the best things about my childhood.) In those days Bolshoi and Kirov tours were rare, so they weren't the ones driving the touring boom. I would add that even later the Bolshoi didn't tour the United States all that frequently. It appeared in New York in 2014 and with limited forces in 2017, the final year of the Lincoln Center Festival. But The Taming of the Shrew sold poorly and Lincoln Center was forced to offer a 25% discount on tickets. The Bolshoi hadn't appeared at the Kennedy Center since 2014, and not in Los Angeles since 2012. (A few cities were planned in 2020, but COVID-19 undid that.) In other words, Americans weren't exactly dependent on the Bolshoi for a ballet fix.
  21. Wayne McGregor rehearsing Alessandra Ferri and Federico Bonelli An intermission feature from the cinema broadcast.
  22. Woolf Works is available on disc from Opus Arte. https://www.opusarte.com/details/OA1282D
  23. I'll say this. A video of actor Sergey Bezrukov reciting Pushkin's "To the Slanderers of Russia" is one of the scariest things I've seen. It positively drips with loathing and belligerence. There are a lot of Russian expats in Cyprus, and there are impresarios who cater to them. (I live nearly 10,000 km away but ended up on a mailing list.) Bezrukov was supposed to bring a one-man show, but first came Covid restrictions, and then Bezrukov was barred from the EU. The presenter kept postponing and postponing, and after a few years simply stopped advertising the show.
  24. ROH Stream has just added three ballets from an all-Ashton program broadcast in 2022: Scènes de ballet (Lamb, Muntagirov), A Month in the Country (Nuñez, Ball, O'Sullivan, Acri, Saunders, Avis) and Rhapsody (Hayward, Sambé). If you haven't signed up yet, the first 14 days are a free trial. After that it's £9.99 per month or £99.99 annually. At the moment the library includes 21 evening-length ballets (including three performances each of Giselle and The Sleeping Beauty) and 20 one-act ballets (5 narrative, 15 abstract). Plus 33 operas and extras (intermission features and public rehearsals, which for the most part were available on YouTube). https://www.roh.org.uk/stream
  25. The theater wasn't hit, but last night the workshops of the Odesa Opera House sustained some damage from falling missle debris. https://www.facebook.com/100063485952677/posts/pfbid0K19E2HatT3ia4WVuJmKJdSVWUTpn3ybw8J9dTUCGy3c62XEm7RxiXcrZLds3cXBAl/?mibextid=CDWPTG
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