London Coliseum
Ismene Brown
In a summer awash with Russian ballet, at its best extravagant, limpid, spectacular - an experience of emotions processed through the eyes - a visit by an American company comes from a quite different sensory position: dance as intelligent motion, rhythmically schooled athleticism. While the American ballet was generated by a grandly classical Russian, George Balanchine, one of the things your eyes constantly search for in watching a US company is the way the Russian ballet genes, nurtured in Tsarist palaces, mutated when they met the bold, open-air, workaday grace over the Atlantic.Boston Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Austere, beautiful, heartbreaking, streaked with genius - that goes for both Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice and Deborah Warner’s remarkable production of it for ENO, returning all too briefly to the Coliseum, with a superb central performance. Besiege the box office for one of the four remaining performances if you want to see contemporary operatic art refined to its most personal and powerful.The story is well-known from Thomas Mann’s novella and Luchino Visconti’s classic film: the downfall of a mature novelist who visits Venice to break his writer’s block, and there falls in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Is it death that makes us go back to the ballet? The one artform where it is so glorified, so exquisitely reimagined as an experience of regret, hope, ecstasy or bleakest resignation that we will go to drink it in again and again, to preview our own? Maybe that’s it. Opera is about living in the threat of death (all those tubercular arias and declarations from the heart of bonfires). Theatre is all about living, imperfectly. But in ballet, life itself is only a holding position - it exists in a realm that looks forward, erotically and existentially, to death, it forecasts the run-up to death Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Yok is a fine Turkish word meaning “there isn’t any”. You use it for “no”, as in, say - is Midnight Express any good? Yok.The hot news surrounding this production was all in the scarpering of its two stars a week before opening, both exceptional Russian artists with stellar reputations to lose. While Britain was agog at the latest fleeing from responsibilities of the wayward tyro Sergei Polunin - slated to play Billy Hayes - probably the more indicative evacuee was the senior Igor Zelensky, Polunin’s mentor and boss at the Stanislavsky Ballet, but better remembered over here as a king of Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
The Mikhailovsky Ballet closed their epic two-week Coliseum season with modern works by their director, Nacho Duato, presumably hoping to display their capabilities at all dance forms. Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness is a work in two acts first created for the Weimar Arts Festival in 1999. Duato used Bach’s canon throughout, focusing on concertos and orchestral suites in the first part (14 pieces), and compositions for organ with further excerpts from The Art of Fugue in the second (seven pieces). The execution of the music by the Mikhailovsky orchestra under their musical Read more ...
judith.flanders
When the Bolshoi’s wunderkinder, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, suddenly left the company two years ago, the dance world played endless guessing-games as to where they would end up. It was like Claude Rains in Casablanca: round up the usual suspects. The last company anyone expected, however, was the Mikhailovsky, St Petersburg’s junior company to its senior world-class sister, the Mariinsky.What drew them? Well, the company has an extraordinary Soviet heritage, playing host to some of the great names of 1930s experimental dance. It probably helps, too, that it is now funded by an Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
“Possibly the least ‘deep’ ballet I’ve ever made” - these are the words that David Bintley uses to describe his latest full-length work Aladdin, and they make rather a discouraging start to any evening. "Light" isn’t necessarily bad – work created in such a manner can often end up communicating something deeper come their unveiling.Aladdin has been a long time coming, with the composer Carl Davis initially mentioning it to Bintley in 2006. The work was eventually created for the National Ballet of Japan in 2008, another reason (according to Bintley) for any obvious weaknesses the production Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
What does _ _ _ _ mean to you? What does _ _ _ _ mean to us all? Questions asked every day by all kinds of people the world over. These same questions were posed last night at the London Coliseum about the doyen of 20th-century dance and choreography, Vaslav Nijinsky, at one of the Russian Ballet Icons galas that annually pack in an audience mostly made up of the Russian community London has now come to call its own.Nijinsky (to me, as a male dancer in my thirties) is responsible for a number of things: first, changing what it meant to be a male dancer; second, defining a new way of moving; Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There is only one rule by which one should ever judge a Barber of Seville. If your eyes (and possibly also your trouser legs) aren’t moist by the time the interval arrives, you might as well leave. The last time this Jonathan Miller production was revived by the English National Opera, it passed with flying colours. This time round, I was dry as a bone. Three hours and I notched up two smiles and a snigger.There’s little wrong with designer Tanya McCallin’s set-up, traditional and 18th century though it all very earnestly is. It’s all neatly tailored to allowing this smooth-as-clockwork Read more ...
David Nice
How’s a good time girl to bare her beautiful soul when a director seems bent on cutting her down to puppet size? It doesn't bother me that Peter Konwitschny shears Verdi’s already concise score by about 20 minutes to shoehorn it into a one-act drama; what goes is either inessential or among the usual casualties of standard Traviatas. The spare and economical idea of layered curtains to symbolise the characters' constriction or emancipation is good in principle, too. But so impassioned is American soprano Corinne Winters’s Violetta that to rob her of any meaningful relationships with the man Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Mikhailovsky Ballet's general director, Russia's fruit tycoon Vladimir Kekhman, may just have been declared bankrupt, but the company is pressing ahead with its star-studded London trip in March. Fraud investigators last week raided the offices of the Mikhailovsky, St Petersburg’s “other” company (ie, not the Mariinsky), looking for connections between Kekhman's business activities and the theatre. Nearly six years ago the "Banana King" became the 180-year-old theatre’s general director and donated a billion rubles to fix its crumbling walls and renovate its programme.But last Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If anyone who saw Matthew Bourne’s irreverent rewrite of The Sleeping Beauty currently at Sadler’s Wells is curious about the original classical ballet, they’ll find it in rousing glory and glinting style with English National Ballet at the Coliseum.Of all the so-called fairytale ballets, this is the most deceptive. Its story is perfunctory, a vehicle for a magnificent display of classicism at its height, essentially an exhibition of balletic jewellery, the romance and reverie all embedded within Tchaikovsky's greatest score. One can see why contemporary choreographers home in on bulking up Read more ...