Royal Ballet
Jenny Gilbert
Unfazed by yet another forced cancellation, the Royal Ballet has notched up a small triumph over the virus. When what was to have been a performance to a live audience in the Opera House fell prey to new restrictions, it went ahead anyway. With safety protocols for the dancers and orchestra already in place, as well as plans for filming, the only difference was that the public didn’t have to turn out in the rain. And with a single £10 ticket covering everyone around the TV, what a bargain that has turned out to be.For a start, there is the sheer variety of a programme that includes little- Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
"Don’t hold back,” a front-of-house manager told us. “If you want to show your appreciation, go for it.” This was nothing to do with providing sound effects for the imminent streaming to tens of thousands around the world. It was about letting the performers know there was a real, live audience in the House. Safely distanced, the non-paying crowd (which included many NHS nurses and their families) filled barely 400 of the 2,200 seats in the Royal Opera House and it felt spookily empty.The dancers of the Royal Ballet have been off stage for seven months but that doesn’t mean they’ve been Read more ...
David Nice
Vintage champagne was served up last night, and whether you found the glass half-full or half-empty would depend on your perspective. In the bigger picture, it's disappointing that not more musicians could return to the Royal Opera House stage, and no-one to the auditorium, as they've been doing to concert halls in Norway, Sweden and Czechia, and to a car-park transformed as operatic space in Berlin (next Saturday, when Covent Garden starts charging for content, more players will, for Schoenberg's chamber arrangement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde). But given the constraints, the Royal Read more ...
Richard Macer
“That’s Marcelino Sambé, he’s wonderful,” said the artistic administrator of the Royal Ballet as I followed her down one of the many corridors that weave throughout the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. “He’s a newly promoted Principal, a very special talent indeed!” I looked over my shoulder at the figure disappearing through some doors. I had been at The Royal Ballet for over a week making a documentary for BBC Four about a golden generation of male stars but as yet had not met any dancers.Access documentaries to institutions such as this take months of negotiation and it’s not uncommon Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The cello is the stringed instrument most closely aligned to the human voice. It has a human shape, too, so in theory it was a short step for choreographer Cathy Marston to give it a living, breathing presence in her ballet about the legendary cellist Jacqueline du Pré. But what a giant leap of imagination that turned out to be.Marston’s first work for the main stage of the Royal Opera House, The Cellist is no straightforward biography, still less does it touch on the torrid accusations that fuelled the film Hilary and Jackie, which was based on a book by her siblings and vehemently disputed Read more ...
Nadine Meisner
It’s no surprise that audiences love John Cranko’s Onegin, with its vividly economical narrative (close to Tchaikovsky’s opera), attractive decors by Jürgen Rose, and intelligent drama. True, it feels a tad old-fashioned – although that, as my neighbour observed, is part of the charm. Performers love it too, for the meaty roles it gives to its principals and the emotional swoop of their dances. You just have to make sure that you are absolutely right for the task, as the otherwise irreproachable Vadim Muntagirov found out at the eleventh hour, causing him to be replaced in the title role by Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In featuring ordinary people and things rather than magic curses or avenging ghosts, Coppélia stands apart in the canon of 19th century ballets. The only mystery about this delightful old production is why the Royal Ballet has not programmed it for more than a decade. For not only does it make a joyful end-of-year alternative to The Nutcracker but arguably a better first-ballet experience – and Covent Garden is pushing accessibility right now.The ballet’s title refers not to its feisty heroine but to a life-size dummy – a mechanical doll positioned in the window of its maker, the inventor Dr Read more ...
Concerto/Enigma Variations/Raymonda Act III, Royal Ballet review - time to cheer the corps de ballet
Jenny Gilbert
As a mood-lifter, it’s hard to beat the opening of Concerto. Against a primrose sky, figures in daffodil, tangerine and brick form lozenges of fizzing colour, foregrounded by a leading couple so buoyant their heels barely ever touch down. Kenneth MacMillan’s response to Shostakovich’s sunny Second Piano Concerto makes a brilliant start to the first mixed bill of the new Royal Ballet season, a bill that unites three productions first seen at Covent Garden in the mid-1960s, although from their wildly contrasting styles you would never guess.In its outer movements Concerto gives the whole Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
This programme of three short works is all about influence, specifically the supposed cross currents between ballet and contemporary dance in the latter half of the 20th century. The irony is that this is the first time that the Royal Ballet has presented a piece made by the great American dance pioneer and experimenter Merce Cunningham, whose centenary this marks. Had they not thought him relevant before now?Still, better late than never. This trio of ballets – a compact, early-ish work by Cunningham, a contemporaneous one by Frederick Ashton, and a world premiere by New Yorker Pam Tanowitz Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Royal Ballet’s choice of season opener could be dismissed as safe and predictable. But as the glorious naturalistic detail of 1830s Paris unfolds in Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 retelling, you see the reasoning. It’s only a year since the Royal Opera House remodelled its ground floor spaces to be more welcoming, and Manon is the ideal first-time ballet. It has everything – glamour, history, a fast-moving love story crackling with illicit sex, crime and social injustice. And it has MacMillan’s choreography, the like of which – in terms of examining the human heart in all its waywardness – Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
You can’t accuse the Royal Ballet of lightweight programming: the three juicy pieces in the triple bill that opened at the Royal Opera House on Tuesday add up to a three-hour running time. That’s a lot of ballet for your buck. Whether they actually go together is another question. Russian-ness is a rather tenuous thread to link the mythic extravaganza of The Firebird, the torrid claustrophobia of Ashton's Month in the Country and the faceted neo-classicism of Balanchine's Symphony in C.A Month in the Country, Frederick Ashton’s throbbing little ode to forbidden passions running high in a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has come a long way since his early days as a hip hop artist, but the outsider status is obvious even before the curtain goes up on Medusa, his first commission for the Royal Ballet and the centrepiece of a triple bill showcasing the company’s contemporary side.Cherkaoui’s choice of subject – the ultimate #MeToo story of classical myth – rules out the usual ballet tropes. Far from being a love story, Medusa’s is a tale of power abuse times two. Sexual violation by a powerful male (the god Poseidon), is followed by punishment meted out by a second authority figure who Read more ...