ROH
Ismene Brown
It’s unspeakably bad for so many reasons that the injured Bolshoi Ballet director Sergei Filin cannot be in London to see his company perform, and one is that he can’t see his protegée Olga Smirnova revealing herself to us as destined to be one of the great ballerinas of this era. Smirnova was signed in 2011 by Filin from the Vaganova Academy in St Petersburg, the Mariinsky’s nursery, whose combination of regal style and gossamer delicacy is evident through every fibre of this miraculous young dancer’s movement.In La Bayadère last night she showed herself not only to possess as if by nature Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Everyone must be wishing the Bolshoi Ballet a swift return to company health after the tragic events of this year, as well as a return to physical health by their horribly injured artistic director - in the circumstances it’s heroic that they have got to London at all, let alone in such good performing order as they showed last night. Many of us will be wishing they had got themselves a worthy production of Swan Lake too, but they haven’t, and so the first night of their three-week visit to Covent Garden was not the glowing triumph it should be in the film script.Those Russian women have a Read more ...
judith.flanders
My great-grandmother used to say, "In the fall, leaves fall," meaning that as the weather gets colder, people die. The Royal Ballet has had leaves falling all year, and in the height of the (ha!) summer one of the most tenacious, and most beautiful, finally fluttered down. Leanne Benjamin, a principal since 1993, retired in the role of her choosing, Kenneth MacMillan’s Mary Vetsera, a crazed, sexed-up nymphet with a death-wish.Benjamin (pictured below right) has had a longer career than most. She is, unbelievably, 49, although you would probably have to see the picture in her attic to prove Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ballet is telling stories again. Last night Wayne McGregor’s debut as a narrator followed hot on the heels of Cathy Marston’s Witch-Hunt for Bern Ballett, both in the Royal Opera House complex, and Northern Ballet’s visit to London with David Nixon’s new The Great Gatsby. (To say nothing of David Bintley's Aladdin and even less of Peter Schaufuss's Midnight Express.)Nixon is known as a straight narrative man, Marston a more expressionistic type, McGregor all abstract and kinetic, theory. Seeing the three works during the current orbit of Kenneth MacMillan’s eyepopping Mayerling at Covent Read more ...
David Nice
"Oh, wretched old man! You are but the shadow of the king”, sings Plácido Domingo’s Nebuchadnezzar about himself in Lear-like abjection before his Goneril-Reganish daughter (the flame-throwing Liudmyla Monastyrska). It’s only true of this brief phase in the protagonist’s sketchy operatic trajectory from hubris brought low to piety raised on high. And it’s certainly not applicable to the one-time top tenor’s latest assumption of a Verdi baritone role, one which may lack the finer nuances of Rigoletto or Simon Boccanegra but which has its moments, all of which Domingo takes with aplomb.The Read more ...
Humphrey Burton
Colin was an enormous influence in my youth and I’d like to share some memories of those days. It was over 60 years ago, on a Sunday afternoon in May 1952, that I attended a concert performance of The Marriage of Figaro given by Chelsea Opera Group in a school hall in Hills Road, Cambridge. The singers were all young, gifted and sparky. The orchestra purred. The narration (written by David Cairns) was genuinely funny, indeed it seemed bliss to be alive that afternoon and to be young (I was 21) seventh heaven. On the podium was Colin Davis, a slim, shock-headed dynamo who lived and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
General booking for the Bolshoi Ballet's Covent Garden season this summer opens on Tuesday (9 April), and the company has at last announced its intended casting. However, it should always be borne in mind that, as Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo habitually announce before every performance, "in accordance with strict Russian tradition, there may be changes". The notable news is the absence of two male names from the roster - Nikolai Tsiskaridze, who is currently taking the Bolshoi Theatre to court over disciplinary action in the wake of the acid attack on Bolshoi director Sergei Filin, Read more ...
judith.flanders
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.” In one of the most famous opening lines in literature, Franz Kafka gives birth to a startling hallucinogenic premise. And Arthur Pita’s very clever dance drama produces something of a similar jolt in its precision and strangeness.Simon Daw’s sparely elegant set presents the two halves of the Samsa household – on one side Gregor’s clinical white bedroom, looking like the “before” picture in a German Expressionist film of an insane asylum; on the other, the Samsas’ kitchen Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Is the Bolshoi Ballet going to have trouble selling its tickets for its London tour as a result of the acid attack on its artistic director Sergei Filin? A range of opinion is erupting among ballet-goers dismayed not only by the attack but by the exposure of vicious infighting inside the Moscow troupe and the subsequent public developments.Filin's key opponent inside the company, the leading dancer Nikolai Tsiskaridze, has been billed to come over on the tour - he has so far expressed no sympathy for Filin's plight, while denying having anything to do with the attack, for which a Bolshoi Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
Ballet Black open their eighth Linbury Studio Theatre season with a quadruple bill of new works which looks promising on paper but less so in actuality. The evening begins with Robert Binet’s EGAL, the title being a (now obsolete) Middle English word meaning equal, which Binet used as the piece’s crux. The work is a duet that’s meant to ‘"xplore the possibilities and complications that might arise if two people who are completely equal in every sense and ability were to encounter each other". Even though the blurb is rather loose, the piece still doesn’t manage to communicate much, if any of Read more ...
David Nice
Studying Russian for three years to read Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin in the original doesn’t guarantee the finest interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s equally great lyric homage. Yet it certainly seems to have focused the imagination of Covent Garden’s new Director of Opera, Kasper Holten, and allows him to inflect every move his characters make with the right emotion.His basic premise begins at the end: with the older, more dislocated Onegin and Tatyana aching their way back to that time in a mid-19th century adolescence when happiness was so close. That makes it clear at the start that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I've always keenly anticipated Derevo. A rare sight in London, they are the must-catch company in a singular branch of mime theatre - some would call it clowning, from an oblique, dark place of visions, fears and childlike imaginings. They are a small monkish Russian troupe who with apparent heedless aim have for the past 25 years been snatching at history, fantasy, antique commedia dell' arte, and the rubbish-strewn street in productions that often leave your brain spinning with questions but your heart twanging with comprehension.They sport shaven heads and bodies of balletic litheness, and Read more ...