Scheherezade

I agree with Mab and Geoff on so many levels but with slight tweaks as follows:

Best production:

Akhnaten - mesmerising, stunning and totally unforgettable;

Runners up:

Norma - Yoncheva unexpectedly impressive and the production better than expected with the exception of the misconceived Watership Down scene ;

Suor Angelica - Jaho utterly heartbreaking;

Worst production:

Oreste - gratuitously nasty, sleazy and utterly offensive;

Runners ups:

Il Trovatore - cartoonish insult to the intelligence of the audience;

Cosi - sadly disappointing, a lost opportunity;

Only just gone and already lamented:

The late, great Hoffman, particularly the ravishing, vampiric Venetian depiction;

Most entertaining performer:

The increasingly appealing Grigolo;

Biggest spectacle:

Joyce di Donato at the Barbican;

Best of British:

David Bates and La Nuova Musica;

Not-opera but just have to mention:

The incomparable Jordi Savall at the Sam Wanamaker in August

Wonderful sets, costumes, dancing. Especially from Ashley Shaw. And the customarily supreme narrative gifts of Matthew Bourne. What's not to enjoy?

Ditto Ian!

"what I really liked was the use of the male members"

 

well, I had to stop and read that again....

 

sorry, sorry, sorry...

Shame on you, Toursenlair. Although I can't imagine what you could mean!

Remarkably, this was the first time that I have been able to see Matthew and Yasmine dance together (apart, I think, from Onegin during the last run?) and I have to say that, even allowing for the many wonderful reviews for this partnership on this forum, I was totally unprepared for the beauty and sincerity of their performance. It is many, many years since a purely classical performance has almost brought a tear to my eye but this one did. There was a lot of excitement in the cheap seats at the front of the amphitheatre and, my goodness, it was well deserved! Bravo indeed!

It is all sad beyond belief and I suspect that however many distinguished voices are raised against the campaign to destroy ENO they will go unheeded because the sole aim of Ms Pollock and the Board is precisely that - to destroy ENO not to revive or preserve it. 

Removing someone considered by the majority of interested punters to be an unsuitable incumbent is not without recent precedent (cf Emma Rice at the Globe and I consider Rice's productions to have far more artistic merit and originality than any of the forthcoming proposals for the Coliseum). Quite clearly ENO has no future under Ms Pollock but I doubt that this is a matter of particular concern for the Board or the irreplaceable Mark Wigglesworth would not have been allowed to leave.

What ENO needs is someone of the calibre of Ms Rojo at the helm. We shall have to see whether Daniel Kramer has her breadth of vision, artistic skills and the ability to lift an ailing organisation through strength of purpose and inspirational leadership.

Did anyone listen in to either? I would be interested to hear any comments.

There comes a time when audiences decide 'up with this I will not put'.  Every abysmal opera premiere is greeted with a barrage of booing at Covent Garden, for reasons I can't fathom this hasn't happened at the ballet yet.  Is there is a lack of discernment involved? 

I think it's because booing at the opera is almost entirely directed at the staging and not the performance, hence the cries for concert performances rather than juvenile, patronising productions designed to massage the director's ego and the view (as exemplified by Kaspar Holten's disparaging aside that if the audience don't like it they will have to be taught) that they know best.

Why not Scheherezade? If done with design skill that can be very successful.  If less skilfully done, then it jars.  And of course it is subjective - there will always be those who clutch pearls in horror at any perceived change to a 'sacred object'.  But in fact there wasn't even a single 19th century form of any of these ballets (as Ratmansky has clearly demonstrated) any more than there was ever only one 'right' way of performing them (same with music - some of Liszt's metronome markings for piano require extraordinary performances, impossible on a modern instrument and historical reviews suggest not achieved by many other than the man himself on period instruments).  

 

There is a range of possibilities, both within that 19th/early 20th century spectrum of performance practice and also departing from it in a way that builds upon elements of the original work and adds modern elements in a way that the choreographer/stager/director'dancer believes is sympathetic and interesting.  Sometimes such attempts are coherent, successful and please critics and audiences, sometimes they don't.

 

To use Floss's phrase, I don't believe that work designed for live performance should (or even can) be set in aspic.  And I don't think it is "maltreatment" to interpret works in a manner which wasn't conceivable at the time of their creation (look at modern dress opera or Shakespeare for example).  And I become a little weary of the same two complaints - "feet in ears/slowing pace at expense of musicality" being trotted out time after time to "prove" that everything about modern technique/stagings is ruining the classics.  And the same old examples (Guillem/Alina Somova's extensions and Makarova's Swan Lake Act 2 glacial pacing) are cited time after time. Not all modern dancers use their full extensions in the classics.  And not all modern dancers take them at funereal pace.  Cherry-picking the evidence is unhelpful and misleading.

I'm sorry you took my comment as a criticism, Lindsay. I love minimalist styling in a period property so it was actually an endorsement.

There are also many who would disagree with Mr Dowler.  There is a slightly Brexity whiff of "everything was better in the olden-days" about some of these pronouncements .......

Mmm. I am not entirely sure what is particularly Brexity in making what is essentially a statement that neglect fosters a decline in standards and core artistic values should be maintained. I read Mr Dowler's views as suggesting that the excellence inherent in those values should not be cast aside lightly by the RB, not that the RB should stagnate in the past purely on nostalgic grounds.

 So what I wonder is whether there is some merits in using modern dancers' technique in the 19th century ballets in a way which doesn't jar with but also doesn't attempt to simply replicate the original performance style - interesting notion (at least to me).

Like minimalist styling in a period property?

Classical Source - Gerald Dowler

I imagine that many would agree with the above sentiments set out in Gerald Dowler's recent review of the current RB Nutcracker.

With the VOS pdd, the sheer exuberance and joie de vivre of Park and Eagling's performance is intoxicating.

Exactly! Exuberance, joie de vivre, sheer enjoyment in performance.

Save_E.N.O. ‏@Save_ENO Nov 26

This in the wake of the 'thrilling' news of ENO's recent casting of Katherine Jenkins and Alfie Boe in 41 performances of Carousel close on the heels of a Coliseum season of Bat out of Hell.

When the curtain went up on Multiverse, to me the set was three dimensional graph, the x and y horizontal axis and the z vertical, then we got time moving within it, total of the basic 4 dimensions, giving the mathematical/scientific reference to multiple universes.

I bow to your far superior knowledge, Margaret. Mine was an instant and purely visual impression.

Multiverse seems to be more powerful than perhaps intended.

"It's gonna rain" said that voice. - And did it rain!!! As soon as the performances had finished, an excess of rain causing flooding in the south west of the UK and points north.

Spooooooky!!!!

Another late posting but I was so knocked sideways by this extraordinary work that I just had to add my comments to the general, although not entirely universal, roar of approval.

I was about to start by saying that this was the first new work that I had seen in a long time that I immediately wanted to see again then realised that this was not true since the same could be said of the last two new works by ENB. My goodness, what an amazing job Ms Rojo is doing and how wonderfully the company is carrying through her dream. ENB must be one of the most exciting companies in the world at the moment and long may it continue!

So back to Giselle and, first up, wasn't it an object lesson in how to use music and silence to illustrate and enhance a mood. And how a minimal set and effective props, costumes and lighting can convey volumes. That revolving wall was an absolute stroke of genius, as were the stabbing poles, the use of the klaxon, the ominous crackling, the shifts from relentless beat to lyricism and the moments of sheer silence. The tension was cranked up from the get-go. It was visceral, menacing, heart-breaking, empowering and effortlessly conveyed a timeless, empirical truth - that love and sincerity will conquer whatever seeks to destroy it.

I think that other posters have probably already said this but it needs to be said again. Khan's choreography totally engages all of the senses and, therefore, draws in the audiences unlike McGregor who, it seems, seeks to alienate them. It has none of the gratuitous, self-congratulatory air of a typical McGregor piece. It effortlessly conveys real emotions and because of this it is utterly absorbing.

It wasn't perfect - the first act didn't immediately make it clear that Albrecht was an aristo who was slumming it and the initial relationship between Giselle and Albrecht was not entirely clear but these are small quibbles and, at the end of the day, they didn't seem to matter all that much, such was the blazing power of the piece overall.

I came away from this Giselle with a similar feeling to the one that I experienced at the Philip Glass Akhnaten a few months ago, that this was a piece that would stay with me for a long time.

I haven't had time to jot down my impressions on this but they were pretty much in line with everyone else, ie Chroma makes far less of an impression than on first showing now that McGregor's signature style is so well known, Multiverse was uniformly more of the same old, same old, and one viewing is more than enough, thank you very much, and Carbon Life was by far the most enjoyable of the three largely due, I suspect, to the total sensory experience provided in no short measure by the musicians and costumes.

Like others I found Francesca Hayward a standout delight: is there anything that she can't do?

And did anyone else find that the dreadful set in Multiverse reminded them of a nineteenth century public urinal? More specifically, it looked as though it had been filched from the similarly urinal-like set used by the ROH in its last Wozzeck showing.

I also found myself comparing McGregor's yawn-inducing lack of originality with the utterly absorbing choreography on show down the road at Sadler's Wells in the Akram Khan Giselle. This showed at once that it isn't repetition that is the fault with McGregor since Khan is, if anything, even more repetitive but in a completely enthralling way that at once enhances the mood and adds to the narrative, drawing in the audience instead of repelling it.

I am still looking forward to seeing Woolf Works again but I do now wonder whether it will prove to be as good as it seemed during its inaugural run or whether the perception of quality was nothing more than a comparison of this piece as against the usual run of the mill McGregor choreography. I do hope not.

True. But on the positive side, the offensive Chinese dance has been replaced.

What has it been replaced with?

Sounds like a good deal:

http://www.travelzoo.com/uk/entertainment/london-southeast/-45-up-Verdi-s-Il-trovatore-in-London-Save-up-to-50--2398173/?utm_source=localdeal_uk&utm_medium=email&utm_content=2400963&utm_campaign=2400963_html_london_deal%3a2398173

It might be if the production wasn't so dire. Although, when compared to the unspeakably unpleasant Manon Lescaut currently on show, it begins to look almost bearable.

Was that the one danced behind a gauze screen for much of the time?  With a wall at the back that had projections going onto it?

That's the one. With Ed Watson and Leanne Benjamin. I still can't figure why it hasn't been revived.

 

Oh well, I loved Invitus Invitam.

As did I.

Even Pizza Express is  not that cheap as the one next door never seems to accept those wonderful vouchers.

Mary, if you ask them what deals they have on they will always give you their 'deals' menu with two courses for £10 and three for £13.

I saw this on Saturday and can't add very much to what Ian and Richard have already said. It was a musical feast in which the dance presented as a master class in perpetuum mobile which fitted the music even if it wasn't always easy to work out exactly what it was supposed to represent. The orchestra, chorus and soloists were all superb and the on-stage setting in which they sang and played behind a visually exquisite gothic screen was extraordinarily effective.

Richard mentioned the costumes, for the most part unitards with ruffs. I found that this gave them something of a Tudor feel. Again it was difficult to square this with the Creation theme but they did sit very well with the gothic screen and they were a distinct improvement on the insipid underwear favoured by so many of today's contemporary choreographers.

I found the choreography somewhat same-ish although skilfully danced. And there was one part which definitely reminded me of the zombie dance in the Thriller video.

Has it been officially announced that the Mariinsky will be visiting the UK next summer, Scheherezade?  (If so I must have missed it.  How grand if it is true.  Do you have dates? Did they announce rep? Did they announce principal participants [e.g., Parish]... but that would be for a separate BcoF listing surely.)  

 

I'm not sure if it's official, Bruce, but in the Gramilano interview, when the January ENB Giselle was mentioned, Xander Paish said that the 2016/17 season would culminate with the Mariinsky summer London season which he was already looking forward to, so here's hoping!