Ratmansky Coppelia for La Scala

[California]

Medici.tv is going to show Ratmansky's new Coppelia for La Scala on Sunday, December 17:

https://www.medici.tv/en/ballets/coppelia-delibes-alexei-ratmansky-la-scala-world-premiere

I can't tell from their announcement if you can only see the premiere or if the recording will remain available to Medici.tv subscribers later.

[volcanohunter]

Medici is giving me an immediate replay, so for now it's available on demand.

I think Ratmansky's Coppélia is quite marvelous, unmistakably his choreography, but structurally unchanged. Coppelius' house stands at stage left, there's traditional mime (poorly filmed here), the "blinking" music is used for blinking... The most surprising changes are giving the Prayer music to a male dancer in a Grecian tunic--the only figure who looked out of place in a central European context--but then the allegorical variations don't appear to be especially allegorical; and Franz and Swanilda sharing her wedding variation. I can understand that. None of the usual pieces of music used for Franz's variation is especially satisfactory. Perhaps the third act doesn't feel as finished as the first, which has amazing vivacity, but there was probably a race to opening night.

I was happy to see Nicole Nicoletta Manni was Swanilda, because in recent years she's developed a habit of "luxuriating" in movement and dragging behind the music, and here she couldn't and didn't. Also, during La Scala's World Ballet Day stream Timofej Andrijashenko seemed to have trouble with Ratmansky's intricate rhythms, but all that seems to have been resolved. Both he and Narvin Turnbull in the Prayer variation did a much better job of batterie than Artemy Belyakov and Alexey Putintsev did in Ratmansky’s Giselle. I also particularly enjoyed Maria Celeste Losa in the Work variation. 

I don't think that any company performing the Petipa/Cecchetti version should replace it, but this would be a very fine choice for companies that aren't. 

[Helene]

I thought the second act was fantastic across-the-board: acting, mime, choreography, and story-telling.  I didn't understand the point or trajectory of most of the third act variations, but part of it was the frustrating editing choices. 

The Prayer variation, choreography and costume, seemed like it was dropped in from another ballet.  It might have had a chance if it were done for a dancer like Dowell in a different costume. I loved the pirate variation, and I wish that I could see PNB's Kuu Saguraki in it, but we have the Balanchine co-production with San Francisco Ballet here, and it's the season's last rep in May-June.

I loved Jerome Kaplan's costumes (aside from Prayer).  Watching them, I remembered the PNB/SFB costumer designer Roberta Guidi di Bagno describing that she was warned that the budget was a lot smaller than she'd have in Europe, and, as Tim Gunn would say, she made it work.  They're quite beautiful and PNB could never have afforded the costumes at La Scala, but it would have been nice to see what she would have been able to do with a bigger budget.

I was able to bring it up just now, which is a few hours after it ended, but there's still nothing on the medici.tv site I see that says anything about how long it will be up.  It's definitely worth seeing.

 

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[volcanohunter]

The intermissions have been edited out of the stream, which would suggest that it will stay up for a while.