Balanchine
judith.flanders
Jardin aux Lilas is one of ABT’s great calling cards, and it was danced with great seriousness of purpose and devotion by an admirably schooled cast. This short ballet, to "Poème" by Chausson (admirably played by a pick-up orchestra), is one of psychology rather than action. In an Edwardian garden, Caroline (the distinguished Julie Kent, as youthful as when she joined the company 25 years ago), is about to marry a man she doesn’t love. She has a brief meeting with the man she does love (Cory Stearns, well cast); in turn, her fiancé, a stuffed shirt, is approached by his now-discarded mistress Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is rare that you read a book, and mentally shout “Yes! Yes!” as you tick off all the things you agree with, but had never actually verbalised. It is even rarer to read a book where, in a subject you know pretty well, on almost every page you learn at least one fascinating new thing. But Jennifer Homans’ Apollo’s Angels is that book.Much has been made of Homan’s epilogue, in which she mourns the death of ballet, the art she so loves. I can understand her feelings – I even feel the same emotion that she does, at least in part. It’s merely that I think she’s wrong (the only place I do). Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We’re getting used to expecting the extraordinary from Natalia Osipova - and then getting some more. With her impish face and farouche capriciousness, with a spring like a high-jumper and shoulders like a swimmer, she is without doubt the most explosively delightful comedienne and virtuoso around at the Bolshoi, but could she be a Giselle? A weak-hearted innocent, a sorrowing ghost, an angel of pleading mercy? Doubt it not. Last night Osipova proved her versatility breathtakingly, weaving the supernatural magic of Giselle in a wholly individual way, defying her own image, and she was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
"It was more than just 'I love you'," Suzanne Farrell, America's nonpareil ballerina, the love and inspiration of 20th-century ballet's greatest choreographer, is telling me at breakfast in a little bar in Lee, Massachusetts. "When people ask me to explain about George Balanchine and myself, I can't put it into words. As Mr B said, 'You don't ask a rose to explain itself.' Some things are unexplainable. Perhaps if you analysed it, you would destroy it."On her 15th birthday, this ballet-crazy Cincinnati girl auditioned in New York for Balanchine, the world-famous choreographer-director 41 Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If you tell a tall, whisper-slim young woman of 31 that she has been described as "the soul of Russia", it is understandable that she looks startled. Two huge, smoke-grey eyes cast a doubtful glance at me, and she murmurs in Russian. Her translator announces: "That is a very serious declaration."So it is. And yet Uliana Lopatkina, despite her tender age, is now lionised almost universally as the greatest ballerina today in Russia, a country where they know about such things. Effortlessly, it seems, in the 10 years since a 5ft 9in beanpole with a square jaw and an apparently boneless body Read more ...
Ismene Brown
THE choreographer George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983, aged 79, of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, a rare, if nowadays notorious, condition only discovered at his autopsy. What had been recognised long before his death, though, was that this man was one of the very greatest geniuses of the 20th century, a figure to be reckoned alongside Pablo Picasso in art and Igor Stravinsky in music.What he did for ballet was nothing less than complete reinvention, applying his mind energetically for almost 60 years to turning the conventional art he had learned in St Petersburg at the Mariinsky Theatre Read more ...