Mashinka

Somova, Novikova, and Osmolkina I am curious about. Anyone seen them? Have any recommendations? Of these three I'd say Osmolkina might make the best Aurora, Novikova can be a bit inconsistent, and although she is a very pretty girl, Somova's hyper-extensions (way beyond 180 degrees) would make her the least attractive choice in my view. I hate to think what she could do to the Rose Adagio.

As a Mary Renault fan, Ive always preferred her Last of the Wine, perhaps the BBC might give us a dramatized version of it in time for the 2012 Olympics. I re-read the book every time I go to Athens.

I don't think the ballet has much to do with Byron, if the ballet followed Byron's story there would be no Medora at all, as she is Conrad's 'off stage' wife who dies of grief after hearing of his capture and death sentence by the Pasha. It is Gulnara who is the heroine as she knifes the Pasha and rescues Conrad, whom she fell in love with when he saved her from the burning harem at the time of one of his raids. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Byron knew Turkey, Greece and the Balkans like the back of his hand and had met a few Pashas in his time (one of whom fancied him). The land he loved best was Greece though and he died fighting for her freedom. Today he is a national hero in Greece. Conrad, by the way is Byron himself (all the clues are there). The work must have meant a lot to him as his daughter by his half sister, Augusta Leigh, was named Medora.

Klingsor's post reminded me that many years ago I too saw The Royal Danes in The Triumph of Death. At the performance I saw, Flemming Flindt the choreographer of the piece, also stripped off, which made the concept of nudity in the work more acceptable to me as he clearly wasn't expecting his dancers to do something he wasn't prepared to do himself.

Two movies I consider terribly overrated are Titanic and Pretty Woman. Apart from some of the SFX, I found Titanic a travesty of what was after all a disaster of awful proportions and that laughable love story just trivialized the tragic loss of life in what was an actual event. A Night to Remember, a black & white film from 1958 starring Kenneth More, was by far the better film and more importantly it was made at a time when the manners and mores of forty odd years before were still remembered and understood. The restraint and heroism depicted in the earlier film is far more moving than anything in the multi million-dollar movie that succeeded it. Pretty Woman is a film that seems to suggest life’s ultimate goal is to engage in orgies of rampant materialism and left a very bad taste in my mouth. Hey girls, meet a rich enough man and you’ll be rewarded with lots of stuff. And do girls as beautiful as Julia Roberts voluntarily become prostitutes (unless they have a drug habit)? I don’t think so.

Thats right. in Russian the letter o is usually pronounced as a short A if it appears in an unstressed syllable, whereas the letter e is generally pronounced ye.

Gediminas Taranda as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

How about John Malkovitch in Grigorovich's Ivan the Terrible?

Alla Osipenko currently works as a coach with the St Petersburg Ballet Theatre which will be touring the UK from the end of next month.

I never thought I'd live to hear Nina Speranskaya and Alexei Fadeyechev described as "sloppy".

Ek also uses nudity in his Swan Lake which features a naked female Rothbart.

Yes, she doesn't dance certain of the traditional 'ballerina' roles such as Sleeping Beauty or Giselle and she very much rations her appearances. On the plus side she has a better idea of what suits her and what doesn't than many other principal dancers. Personaly though, I think the results when someone is 'cast against type' can be rather interesting.

Romuald et Juliette directed by Coline Serreau (French 1990) with the incomparable Daniel Auteuil as Romuald and Firmine Richard in the title roles.

Markarova Fan, I've yet to meet anyone who wasn't impressed by this dancer. He was quite remarkable, but because of prevailing politics of the time he was not seen in the west as often as some of his contemporaries. On stage and off he was quite a character and has a very warm, extrovert personality. He was born in Kaliningrad on 26th February 1961 to a Russian Cossack mother and Lithuanian father and began dancing in his hometown of Voronezh before joining the Bolshoi Ballet. He was successful from the very start of his career and created the role of Yashka in Grigorovitch's Golden Age. He appeared in most of Grigorovitch's ballets and a lot of his roles are preserved on video. He was, I believe the only dancer to appear as both Crassus and Spartacus. Sadly he fell out with Grigorovitch in the 90's getting sacked from the Bolshoi, and went on to form his own company, The Imperial Russian Ballet, along with Maya Plisetskaya. They have also set up a school. The company dances regularly in Russia and Europe and recently appeared in New Zealand. Every year in September/October the IRB dances at a festival in Finland – here’s the link. http://www.balletmikkeli.com/eng/taranda_eng.php When the company started out he was joined by a number of his friends from both the Bolshoi and Kirov and the guest roll call has been very impressive, though the company has also nurtured principals of it's own. Last year I saw them in Germany and was very impressed by Kiril Radev, a Vaganova trained dancer who appeared in The Nutcracker. Gediminas's younger brother, the irrepressible Vitautus, danced the role of Drosselmeyer. Sadly I had missed seeing Gediminas himself as he had flown back to Moscow two days before. In addition to his dancing he has appeared as an actor on numerous occasions and was recently involved in Moscow's bid for the 2012 Olympics. My one regret is that his company never dances in the UK.

I would say she is regarded by the St Petersburg audience as the "grand prima", but with her extremely narrow repertoire, it's difficult to see her as an "assoluta" in the conventional sense.

If this is what I think it is, it was filmed in a circus tent in Battersea Park, London, around 1986. I think there is a complete Les Sylphides with Alexei Fadeyechev (for my money there best male classicist in the company at around that time) an act of Spartacus and a Don Q pas de deux, maybe a Spring Waters too.

I saw Ek's Giselle live at the Opera Garnier last year with Marie-Agnes Gillot and Nicholas Le Riche in the leading roles and found their performances deeply moving. Gillot in particular was a revelation as I had previously only seen her in roles that celebrated her very striking good looks and in Giselle she was totally transformed. Although I believe Ek's work to be following a familiar formula now and am not an admirer of everything he has produced, to call it "void of any aesthetic" (sic) doesn't do justice to a serious and committed artist' As Giselle is generally presented in the medieval period, it is well to remember that the "droit de seigneur" held sway at that time in Europe and Albrecht would simply have summoned her to his castle and had his way with her (as he would with any other village girls that took his fancy) Society accepted this and no one would have died. But then you wouldn't have had an interesting story, would you? Last year I took a much younger friend on his first visit to the Louvre; when he saw the Mona Lisa he was completely overwhelmed and I almost had to drag him away from her, which just goes to show how different our reactions are when confronted by any work of art.

I don't think that picture will win her many fans!

The Bessmertnova video is worth buying for the performance by Gediminas Taranda.

There are actually two Bolshoi videos of Raymonda, both with Taranda; which one do you have? The Semenyaka/Mukhamedov or the Bessmertnova/Vasuchenko?

She's retired now I believe, but I agree she was one fantastic dancer. Oddly I tend to have the fondest memories of Kirov dancers that didn't get to be principals and the same goes with those dancing today.

In the Baron at the Ballet series of books that were published in the '50's you can find fabulous pictures of the Paris Opera Ballet including a set of photos of Lifar's "Blanche-neige".

Odd preference. Having seen Zelensky dance last Saturday I have to report that he eliminated just about all the lifts from La Bayadere. If he does the same in Beauty, the effect will be rather strange to say the least.

I thought Forsythe had cornered the market in that! :rolleyes:

I'm on shaky ground here as I've never seen a live performance of this work, but I think there is more than one version of this around. I have a made for TV video of LHBH from the 1990's which uses the Shchedrin music, but I think fragments exist of an earlier production (Petipa?) using Pugni. The extract of the older ballet that I have with the Kirov and Lopatkina on another video is definitely not with music by Shchedrin. I'm almost certain more than one version exists.