Royal Ballet 2017/18 season

[Sim]

 Sergei did not dance Rudolf until he was at the Stanislavsky.

 

And very well too, from all the reports I read!  I would so love to see him in that role.

[FLOSS]

A frog

 

I think that the performances of Manon in consecutive seasons were not originally planned by the RB. They occurred because the opera company lost a production and had a gap in its schedule which Mason filled by reviving Manon and casting the dancers who had made their debuts the previous season. I think that the tickets were a bit slow to sell but I don't recall the theatre being empty. I don't know if it is true but I recall that it was suggested at the time that there were more established dancers who thought that they should have been given some of the performances because it would have guaranteed ticket sales but it would have defeated the object of the exercise. It is the only time that I recall the MacMillan ballets being revived out of their usual sequence.

 

Somebody has told me that they read in Opera magazine  that the new production of Der Freischutz is not going to happen  and that neither is the new Carmen production. Carmen is not a problem as long as the contracted singers agree to appear in the old production, always assuming that it has not been disposed of, but if the new Freischutz is not happening it is quite possible that the ballet company will find itself filling the gap in the schedule.

Edited March 8, 2017 by FLOSS

[aileen]

Tickets for the last run of Manon (was it Autumn 2015?) had to be discounted.

[Sim]

I can't remember offhand, but are Mayerling and Anastasia the only MacMillan we are getting this 2016/17 season?  Or have I missed something (I don't have a list of this season's performances to hand and don't have time to look, but I can't remember seeing anything else....but that just may be me having an all-too-frequent senior moment!).

[ninamargaret]

It would be interesting to know who the next generation of Rudolph's might be. Three of the four appearing in May are, shall we say, mature dancers. The next run, whenever it is,could throw up some interesting casting. Any ideas?

[Sim]

OK....my starter for ten:

 

Matthew Ball is a great actor and his technique and partnering are improving all the time, so I would say he may well be ready to tackle Rudolf next run.  I think Calvin Richardson is also a potential as he too has wonderful technique and can really act.  Probably needs more partnering experience.  Physically, Reece Clark could be good because he is starting to prove himself as a wonderful partner (I was very impressed with his partnering of Zen and Lauren) but I haven't had the chance to see him in a dramatic role yet so don't know if he has the whole package, as it were.  I would also be interested to see what Zucchetti could do with the role;  he is after all a First Soloist so should get a crack at a meaty role.    If Alexander Campbell is being considered as the next generation, although he is a principal already, I think he could and would be a wonderful Rudolf.

 

These are the first who spring to mind, but I will probably think of more as soon as I've pressed 'post'  !!  

[bangorballetboy]

I can't remember offhand, but are Mayerling and Anastasia the only MacMillan we are getting this 2016/17 season?  

 

Correct (though the Royal Ballet School are doing Concerto in their summer performances).

[Duck]

It would be interesting to know who the next generation of Rudolph's might be. Three of the four appearing in May are, shall we say, mature dancers. The next run, whenever it is,could throw up some interesting casting. Any ideas?

 

When I saw Tristan Dyer as Victor in Frankenstein, I thought that I would quite like to see him as Rudolf - he looked suitably tormented and I liked his partnering.

[ninamargaret]

Correct (though the Royal Ballet School are doing Concerto in their summer performances).

We also had The Invitation

[Bruce Wall]

OK....my starter for ten:

 

Matthew Ball is a great actor and his technique and partnering are improving all the time, so I would say he may well be ready to tackle Rudolf next run.  I think Calvin Richardson is also a potential as he too has wonderful technique and can really act.  Probably needs more partnering experience.  Physically, Reece Clark could be good because he is starting to prove himself as a wonderful partner (I was very impressed with his partnering of Zen and Lauren) but I haven't had the chance to see him in a dramatic role yet so don't know if he has the whole package, as it were.  I would also be interested to see what Zucchetti could do with the role;  he is after all a First Soloist so should get a crack at a meaty role.    If Alexander Campbell is being considered as the next generation, although he is a principal already, I think he could and would be a wonderful Rudolf.

 

These are the first who spring to mind, but I will probably think of more as soon as I've pressed 'post'  !!  

 

 

Have to confess that Mayerling is far from my favourite ballet - and I was relieved to hear a couple of other people admit to such on BcoF on a different forum page.  (T'was something I never thought I'd actually hear here.)  

 

That said I think that Ruldolf is a vehicle for a dominant personality or for a surprise twist amongst the seemingly more vulnerable.  (For me that latter is what made Cope so special in the outing.)  For the former I really enjoyed the literal outpourings of Mukhamedov in the role and I would love to see I. Vasiliev dance it as he said he (i) wanted to and (ii) was actually in preparation to do.  MacMillan gives the bones for people to put on a variety of flesh here much as Gregorovitch does in epics like Ivan the Terrible and Spartacus.  Mayerling's narrative of course is all over the shop - a far cry from the creative mastry of, say, Broken Dreams.  (There's a ballet I did TRULY adore .. and - with all DUE respect to Khan's Giselle - which I admired as well - I so wish Broken Dreams had got the specific Olivier nomination nod.  For me, it furthered the 'original' narrative conversation on in a way that Khan's Giselle perhaps couldn't just yet - and did such through a clear balletic fulcrum.) 

 

I'm not entirely certain .. but I do genuinely feel that Sambe might well be a good candidate for Rudolf.  His performance in Ceremony of Innocence (a ballet I DID like and would very much like to see revived) - in the role he created - showed he had dramatic stealth (i.e., the proverbial chops) and might well be able to hammer together - or is that out? - MacMillan's rough hewn dots admirably in this specific regard.  I very much like how Sambe clearly listens and responds in everything he does.  It can sometimes mark him out.

 

Also in this age where women are quite rightly playing the major male Shakespearean roles - Viva Dame Harriet Walter, Dame Helen Mirren, Glenda Jackson, Michelle Terry, etc., - I'd love to see a woman's take on Rudolf.  (More shock/horror I suppose amongst some here.)  I think there are some female dancers who could be quite revelatory in this framework and I may be wrong but I suspect that suggestion might well have appealed to MacMillan himself.  (Indeed - not about Mayerling it has to be said - but he suggested something very much akin to this in my own ear on a NYC bus journey many, MANY moons ago.  Certainly he was interested in the concept.) 

Edited March 8, 2017 by Bruce Wall

[Sim]

We also had The Invitation

That was last season...

[ninamargaret]

That was last season...

Sorry, things blur - probably my age!

[FLOSS]

I should be concerned if any really young dancer were cast as Rudolph in Mayerling as it is such a heavy role. Watson is on record as saying that by the time you get to the end of act 1 it feels as if you have danced a full length ballet because you have danced with so many partners during the course of that initial act. David Wall said that dancing the role of Rudolph took at least five years off his career as a dancer.

 

While I would like to think that the company is better at preparing dancers for the role than it was when the ballet was new I am not sure that I would want to take the risk of casting dancers as young as Ball, Clarke or Richardson in the ballet at their age for fear that it would significantly shorten their careers. I don't think that I am quite ready for the RB becoming a company in which dancers generally don't last much beyond their early thirties.

Edited March 8, 2017 by FLOSS

[Sim]

Would dancing Rudolf a couple of times every two or three years really shave five years off a younger dancer's career? Especially these days where they have all kinds of advanced physical fitness training that wasn't available in David Wall's day or even Ed Watson's earlier days? It is definitely one of the most, if not THE most, demanding male roles, and whereas it must be exhausting to rehearse and dance, would it affect the young generation in the same way I wonder, with all of the enhanced fitness and body strengthening programmes that they undertake these days? They also seem to have much healthier lifestyles in that a lot fewer of them smoke and drink, and they have nutrition advice and programmes, etc.

 

I don't know the answer...just putting my wonderings down on a post!

[alison]

Didn't Watson, Cope and someone else - Kobborg? - say that Romeo is actually physically harder?

[Sim]

That's interesting, Alison. Looking at both roles from a spectator's aspect, it would seem that Rudolf is the more physically and emotionally demanding one, but maybe dancing them is a lot different from what we see from in front of the stage!

[Sunrise]

Didn't Cope dance Rudolf early in his career? And he was still dancing it into his 40s. I also still marvel that Mukhamedov was able to come out of retirement to dance Rudolf so powerfully as well.

 

Granted these two are built a little differently to the young dancers mentioned here.

[aileen]

Personally, I feel that Rudolf (like Onegin) is a role for a more mature dancer although I believe that Polunin danced it very successfully whilst he was still in his early twenties. I think that you need a powerful physical presence on the stage which few very young men have.

 

Bruce, I assume that you are referring to Lopez Ochoa's Broken Wings. I too wish that it had had more recognition as I think that the choreographer's approach to narrative was so fresh and inventive. You saw all the elements of Frida Kahlo's life without plodding through scenes of, say, Kahlo standing by a canvas brandishing a paintbrush or being stretchered off the stage after being knocked down by a cardboard car. I really hope that it's brought back.

[Guest]

Didn't Cope dance Rudolf early in his career? And he was still dancing it into his 40s. I also still marvel that Mukhamedov was able to come out of retirement to dance Rudolf so powerfully as well.

 

Granted these two are built a little differently to the young dancers mentioned here.

Hi Sunrise. If memory serves me correctly, I think that Cope first danced this in the mid 1990's. I think that in the 1992 (a revival of the ballet after a few (six?) years out of the rep) contained three casts: Mukhamdeov/Durante/Colllier...Jeffereies/Collier/Chadwick...Nunn/Revie/Rosato. Then Cooper and Cope were probably the next two male dancers to take it on, meaning that Cope was probably at least 30 when he first danced it, first of all with Revie and then eventually with Rojo (once again, if memory serves me correctly, I never saw him in the role).

[alison]

I think it would have been 1994 (and at rather short notice)?  IIRC, he replaced Cooper, who was himself a replacement for Nunn who was injured. 

[Guest]

as long as they put it with Pierre Luniere and something like Wedding Bouquet, I'd be happy (could miss all 3 in one hit then).

As you might gather - not one of my favourites!!  :-)

Dave, like you, I have never 'warmed', if that is correct word, to 'My Brother, My Sisters'. ' A Wedding Bouquet' happens to be one of my all- time favourites. It packs a deep punch...its so 'light', yet so profoundly sad. Be jilted in some way or another and maybe you will see it as I do! Even before all that, I loved this piece for its weird humour and the fact that its packed with balletic references and off-beat, yet totally recognizable characters. Pierrot Lunaire, on the other hand, I feel neither love nor dislike for.

[Guest]

I think it would have been 1994 (and at rather short notice)?  IIRC, he replaced Cooper, who was himself a replacement for Nunn who was injured. 

I remember seeing Cooper who, at that particular show, was a last minute replacement for someone. 1994 sounds about right, Alison!

[Mary]

Yes about right. Cope's mature performances were my personal favourites. 2005 stands out ( when he won Critics Circle I think  was it ?).

I once met him and told him that, and he grimaced and just said he thought he did it 'badly- oh all right but not as well as I should have'- it is such an incredibly tough and exhausting, draining role.

 

Lovely, modest man. He was sensational in it.

[AnneMarriott]

 

 

 

Also in this age where women are quite rightly playing the major male Shakespearean roles - Viva Dame Harriet Walter, Dame Helen Mirren, Glenda Jackson, Michelle Terry, etc., - I'd love to see a woman's take on Rudolf.  (More shock/horror I suppose amongst some here.)  

 

 

 

Not shock/horror, Bruce, but some bemusement.  How on earth could a woman - any woman - cope with all those athletic pas de deux?

[David]

Not shock/horror, Bruce, but some bemusement.  How on earth could a woman - any woman - cope with all those athletic pas de deux?

I'm really looking forward to Derek Jacobi as Mother Courage and David Tennant as Cleopatra!

[Bruce Wall]

Not shock/horror, Bruce, but some bemusement.  How on earth could a woman - any woman - cope with all those athletic pas de deux?

 

This is in the realm, Anne, of 'I now wouldn't be surprised IF'.  Things have changed so drastically in my own lifetime ... and that includes bodies and stealth.  I do honestly think the roles might - at some point closer than we might imagine - be able to be reversed ... or shared.  Someday someone will try it.  That was the point I think MacMillan was making on the bus.  I have a feeling - if he was still about - it is something he would like to investigate ... and help mold.  He might well by now have tried it on for size; making adjustments only where absolutely necessary.  Just look at what McGregor is doing.  Women are - after all - just such EXTRAORDINARY beings.  They bring so much to the table.  I think of someone like the thrilling Karinn von Aroldingen in the past ...  Of course I suppose there are few here who will remember her.  What the future might - indeed WILL - bring is entirely enticing to spectulate on.  I'm sure women will - as they always have - exceed expectations!  On that score I feel certain.

 

Oh, and Rudolf was - heaven knows - into intrigue!!  LOL.  

Edited March 9, 2017 by Bruce Wall

[FLOSS]

Perhaps when posting casting wish lists for Mayerling we need to take into account the fact that the young dancers who you want to see cast as Rudolph have had far less experience than the three dancers originally cast as Rudolph in 1978 had had at their age, Both Wall and Jeffries had spent the early years of their careers dancing with the Touring company and all three of them had plenty of experience dancing with a number of partners during the course of a performance. I think that it was the fact that Rudolph dances with four different partners during the first act which Watson said was the exhausting element in the ballet.

 

I am not sure that Cope was all that young when he made his debut as Rudolph. Remember Cope's career falls into two distinct parts his early years 1982- 90 and his later career which began in 1992. In 1990 Cope and his wife retired from dancing to pursue careers away from dance. He rejoined the company at the beginning of the 1992-93 season.At the time that it was announced that he was returning to the company Cope said that he had left because he had felt burnt out and exhausted by ballet's physical stress. It is those comments as much as anything which would make me hesitate about casting young relatively inexperienced dancers as Rudolph. Cope spent two years in the "real world " before he decided to return to the company in the 1992-93 season. He danced Rudolph in 1994 which I believe was his debut in the role, which would have made him thirty or thirty one when he first danced the role.

 

Bruce,

If Zoe Anderson's book about the RB's first seventy five years is anything to go by then the official RB version about Liebesleider Waltzer is that no one liked it when the company performed it aeons ago which suggests that it is unlikely to grace the boards at Covent Garden any time soon. This of course is a great shame because it is a great ballet, London audiences are not as funny about Balanchine as they once were and the company has dancers who would more than do it justice.

 

Here is a suggestion for a mixed bill that no one will ever stage, if only because each of the ballets is so short, but it would be fascinating to see it. Lilac Garden, La Fete Etrange and A Wedding Bouquet. It would only work if management were absolutely scrupulous about taking care to cast the dancers who are really suited to the roles in each ballet. No stars or casting Mr X or Miss Y because we need to give them something to do. I think that the company owes a debt to the choreographers who created these ballets because they all of them suffered from inept casting at their last revival and were badly lit.

 

For those who like emotional states depicted in dance then Lilac Garden is the ballet for you.It is so sophisticated in its use of dance form and  naturalism that it makes MacMillan look like a beginner.Fete Etrange was so badly lit when last revived because of damage to the back cloth and seemingly cast on the basis of needing to give the dancers in it something to do.Anyone who saw it could be forgiven for thinking that the ballet is a dud but it was not cast as sensitively as any ballet that has been out of the repertory for years should be.I think that James Hay would be wonderful as the Young Man who stumbles across the wedding celebrations and on the basis of what he does with the role of Alain it would probably suit Paul Kay rather well. As far as Wedding Bouquet is concerned it is glorious fun when cast with care. I can't see what there is to complain about in a ballet set in provincial France where the bridegroom is surrounded by his past.

 

I will simply say that anyone who encountered any of these works in the last twenty years has not really seen them. They have only seen approximations of them, But that's true of several other works that don't get seen that often such as Birthday Offering.which looked appalling at its last revival.It's not  the ballet that does not work it was the casting and the dancers' inability or reluctance to adjust their performance style to the one needed to reflect Ashton's musicality which scuppered it.

Edited March 9, 2017 by FLOSS

[Sim]

Not shock/horror, Bruce, but some bemusement.  How on earth could a woman - any woman - cope with all those athletic pas de deux?

Just what I was thinking Anne! 

[bridiem]

This is in the realm, Anne, of 'I now wouldn't be surprised IF'.  Things have changed so drastically in my own lifetime ... and that includes bodies and stealth.  I do honestly think the roles might - at some point closer than we might imagine - be able to be reversed ... or shared.  Someday someone will try it.  That was the point I think MacMillan was making on the bus.  I have a feeling - if he was still about - it is something he would like to investigate ... and help mold.  He might well by now have tried it on for size; making adjustments only where absolutely necessary.  Just look at what McGregor is doing.  Women are - after all - just such EXTRAORDINARY beings.  They bring so much to the table.  I think of someone like the thrilling Karinn von Aroldingen in the past ...  Of course I suppose there are few here who will remember her.  What the future might - indeed WILL - bring is entirely enticing to spectulate on.  I'm sure women will - as they always have - exceed expectations!  On that score I feel certain.

 

Oh, and Rudolf was - heaven knows - into intrigue!!  LOL.  

 

I think that men are rather extraordinary beings too; and there are very few full-length works built around a dramatic male lead in the way that Mayerling is, whereas women already have a wide spectrum of possibilities.

[A frog]

A frog

 

I think that the performances of Manon in consecutive seasons were not originally planned by the RB. They occurred because the opera company lost a production and had a gap in its schedule which Mason filled by reviving Manon and casting the dancers who had made their debuts the previous season. I think that the tickets were a bit slow to sell but I don't recall the theatre being empty. I don't know if it is true but I recall that it was suggested at the time that there were more established dancers who thought that they should have been given some of the performances because it would have guaranteed ticket sales but it would have defeated the object of the exercise. It is the only time that I recall the MacMillan ballets being revived out of their usual sequence.

 

Somebody has told me that they read in Opera magazine  that the new production of Der Freischutz is not going to happen  and that neither is the new Carmen production. Carmen is not a problem as long as the contracted singers agree to appear in the old production, always assuming that it has not been disposed of, but if the new Freischutz is not happening it is quite possible that the ballet company will find itself filling the gap in the schedule.

 

Regardless of why they did it, it still shows a somewhat popular Macmillan ballet wouldn't be popular enough to sell well two seasons in a row.

 

The amphitheatre was very sparsely attended on at least one of the nights I attended, I remember being able to move five years further to the front at the interval as there was a huge block of empty seats in the central area.

[Bruce Wall]

I think that men are rather extraordinary beings too; and there are very few full-length works built around a dramatic male lead in the way that Mayerling is, whereas women already have a wide spectrum of possibilities.

 

Dear bridem,  here too I wasn't meaning in exlusion of but rather in addition to.  

 

Certainly Men have had their crack in several instances at takes of some of those famed female leads.  I am sure we can all think of several examples.  Have enjoyed and learned from watching the breadth of those outings too.  

Edited March 9, 2017 by Bruce Wall

[bridiem]

Dear bridem,  here too I wasn't meaning in exlusion of but rather in addition to.  

 

Certainly Men have had their crack in several instances at takes of some of those famed female leads.  I am sure we can all think of several examples.  Have enjoyed and learned from watching the breadth of those outings too.  

 

Understood, Bruce; but there are never that many performances of Mayerling and so the opportunities even for men to dance it are scarce.

[Naomi M]

 Sergei did not dance Rudolf until he was at the Stanislavsky.

 

Thank you! I saw the documentary Dancer and there were some footage of him as Rudolf so I was wondering about that.