ROH
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 ...
judith.flanders
It’s hard to work out why the Royal Ballet has not indulged in more Jerome Robbins, so eminently suited does it seem for their taste for emotional understatement. In the Night had a few outings in the 1970s, and has only now been revived, possibly after seeing the audience response to the Mariinsky’s immaculate performance of the same in London a year ago.To Chopin Noctures, three couples play out their relationships. To paraphrase the famous description of Waiting for Godot, nothing happens three times. But in that “not happening” Robbins dissects the art of the pas de deux, constructing Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Few singers provoke more debate than Rolando Villazón. His off-piste projects - from his Romantic exploration of the Baroque to his spell as a talent contest judge - have been much discussed over the years. By comparison, there's something strangely calm and conventional about Villazón's two latest projects: a new album of Verdi on Deutsche Grammophon and a performance of John Copley's La Bohème at the Royal Opera House. Yet you'd be foolish to ignore either. The celebrated Mexican tenor is the kind of singer who could make the Yellow Pages seem fresh. Theartsdesk caught Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So Tony Hall moves from heading the Royal Opera House to taking over the BBC as its new Director-General. I can't for a moment imagine a rerun of that crucial mini-conversation between Helen Boaden and George Entwistle over the Jimmy Savile programming (if you can remember all the way back to mid-October through the cannonfire since) taking anything like a similar course had it been Tony Hall rather than Entwistle.Entwistle prided himself, even congratulated himself on not asking a single question about why Newsnight's investigation into Savile should have any relevance to his programming of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Make no mistake; this is dancing of the highest order. The classically trained members of Wayne McGregor's company Random Dance demonstrate such exceptional mastery of technique that their movements should have one drooling in admiration. And since they wear little more than vests and pants for this production of FAR, every muscle in their perfectly honed bodies is visible as it tenses and releases, flexes and extends. Rather than being entranced by the beauty and fluency of their limbs, though, I found myself watching with cool dispassion. And soon, I realized I was thinking of the dancers Read more ...
judith.flanders
A new Liam Scarlett ballet has become an event, even as, in this case, Scarlett’s home company, the Royal Ballet, is recreating a work he choreographed last January for Miami City Ballet – the young choreographer’s first international commission.In Viscera, Scarlett continues to pay homage to his choreographic masters – previously he has tipped his hat to Ashton and MacMillan. For Miami, directed for so many decades by George Balanchine’s great muse Edward Villella, he not unnaturally looks to the American genius. His choice of music – a piano concerto by Lowell Liebermann – sets the tone, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tonight the Royal Ballet's live Swan Lake opens the most extensive season yet of live screenings to cinemas worldwide of the Royal Opera House's productions. Zenaida Yanowsky and Nehemiah Kish, in the leading roles of the Swan Queen and her evil counterpart Odile, and Prince Siegfried, will be beamed across oceans to cinema-goers in St Julians, Malta, to the Montevideo Moviecenter in Uruguay, as well as to the Apollo, Burnley and the Enfield Cineworld.The Opera House website lets you enter your country and postcode and instantly find cinemas near you that will simultaneously be screening the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The virtuoso Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova will guest with the Royal Ballet this autumn with Carlos Acosta in the opening run of Swan Lake. Osipova, whose partnership with the phenomenal Ivan Vasiliev has become the most talked-about in world ballet, will dance the double role of Odette/Odile (the White Swan and Black Swan) on 10, 13 and 25 October with the RB's Cuban star Carlos Acosta, in place of Tamara Rojo, the ballerina who becomes English National Ballet's artistic director from September.Osipova and Vasiliev caused a sensation off-stage last winter when they quit the Bolshoi to Read more ...
David Nice
Pardon the anomaly of a lightly browned-up Latvian Moor married to a German-Greek beauty. This, after all, is not Shakespeare’s play but Verdi’s opera, for which all too few are born to sing heroic tenor Otello and lyric-dramatic soprano Desdemona. Great singing from Aleksandrs Antonenko and great everything from Anja Harteros vindicate Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano’s decision to give Elijah Moshinsky’s 25-year-old production a proud place in the World Shakespeare Festival and to mix finesse with power in realizing every facet of this astonishing score.The framework still holds Read more ...
graham.rickson
Massenet: Werther Rolando Villazón, Sophie Koch, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House/Antonio Pappano (DG)Massenet’s Goethe adaptation needs a lot of love to make it convince as a drama. Fortunately this live Covent Garden performance, taped last May, has Antonio Pappano at the helm. There’s no one better at glossing over the piece’s longueurs. You need someone who can make you forget Werther’s clunkiness, its occasional risible moments. I can never maintain a straight face in Act 3 when Charlotte learns of Werther’s fateful message: “ I am leaving on a lengthy journey. Will you lend me Read more ...