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Wednesday, January 19


dirac

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Reviews of the English National Ballet in "Raymonda."

Slipped Disc

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Rojo, by contrast, while she’s sorting Raymonda’s other problems, does considerable violence to both Petipa and Glazunov. She and her musical colleagues Gavin Sutherland and Lars Payne disregard structure and style, shift individual numbers from act to act, set busy dance steps to non-dance music, and reassign music to different characters.......

The Guardian

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Of course, score, sets, style, roles and steps had to be reworked to fit the rethink, but never mind purism: does it work?

In parts, but not as a whole. ...........

The Evening Standard

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Raymonda is a quietly exacting role, pushing doubts into poise. The supremely pliant Shiori Kase gives her an unhurried, tilting grace in public, but privately digs into her tug-of-love tussle. Glazunov’s score is a stunner, and the orchestra under Gavin Sutherland relishes its lush and sparkling textures. Rojo and her designers (sets, which make imaginative but sparing use of video projection, and costumes are by Antony McDonald) create enthralling scenes, notably a dream where pleated paper lanterns cast a firefly glow as dancers swoop and scamper, building a tender collage of casualty and care.

 

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More reviews of the ENB.

The Independent

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Rojo’s approach is more radical, shifting the story from a vague chivalric past to the Crimean war in 1854. Like Florence Nightingale or Mary Seacole, her heroine is inspired to take up nursing, traveling to Sebastopol. As before, she is caught between two men – but the Saracen villain of 1898 is now an Ottoman ally, and her attraction to him is no longer just subtext.

The Telegraph

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At any rate, the result overall is still quintessentially classical in its steps, although several threads of modernity run through it. There’s the heroine’s internal tussle, not only between suitors, but also between both of them and her career. What’s more, the fact that that heroine is now a nurse feels decidedly of the moment, added to which (shrewdly exploiting the fact that the Crimean War was the first to be extensively photographed by the press) the production often has an old-school photographer documenting the characters’ exploits. Cameras everywhere: what could be more 2020s than that?

The Stage

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 And more.....

The Times

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Tamara Rojo’s decade-long reign as the artistic director of English National Ballet has been marked by bold choices, and this revamped version of Marius Petipa’s late 19th-century Russian classic is no exception. Raymonda is the former star ballerina’s first crack at choreography — after Petipa, that is, plus assistance with the character dances by Vadim Sirotin. More significantly, Rojo and her team (including a dramaturg, Lucinda Coxon) have tried to de-problematise their source material by transplanting the narrative from the Crusades to the Crimean War and converting the titular heroine from a beleaguered noblewoman whose position is defined by two men (a heroic French knight versus a villainous Muslim warrior) to a nurse at the front à la Florence Nightingale.

The New York Times

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Esteemed ballerina. Experienced artistic director. Skilled fund-raiser. In Tamara Rojo, who was announced last week as San Francisco Ballet’s next leader, American dance has tapped a woman of many talents. Still, the San Francisco company may want to hold off on adding choreography to her list of duties.

 

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A review of the production by Rosemary Waugh for inews.

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Yet this same surface-level quality invades the production in other, more fundamental ways too. Despite all its visual splendour – and it really is gorgeous to look at and peppered with precision pointe work – the core, human drama underlying the action is missing. We’re given the snipped and bound family album to flick through, but not the messy, in-the-moment reality to really place us in the picture.

 

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