ChrisG

If anyone’s interested, a live concert recording of Les Noces from the 1996 Verbier Festival has just been released by Deutsche Grammophon on Spotify and Apple Music Classical. It features the choir I sing in, the Hallé Choir, and talking to those who took part it sounds like it was a hoot! The album also includes a recording of Rite of Spring from the 2013 festival.

Wonderful news! Tiler Peck this season - the whole company next!!

Just had an email from Covent Garden to say that Australian Ballet will no longer be performing Kunstkamer and have replaced it with Balanchine's Jewels. Existing ticket holders are being offered a refund, though I certainly won't be asking for one!

I knew that, and I'm going to see it! I missed out an important word - I meant to say 'it's a while since we saw a NEW shorter Wheeldon work'. I must remember to proof read my words!

My thoughts about next season!: Given it's the Rachmaninov 150th anniversary year, I'm guessing it's possible we might see Rhapsody in a triple bill in the autumn. An obvious work to pair it with would be Symphonic Dances, but that would be a tricky decision to make. It's a while since we saw a shorter Wheeldon work (Corybantic Games?), so I would predict we see one of those in a triple bill sometime next season I really enjoyed Jess and Morgs' new works for Scottish Ballet and BRB this season, so given Kevin O'Hare often seems to go with the zeitgeist, I would think it's possible they might be doing something, even if it's only in the Linbury Into pure wish-list territory now, I'd love to see, in no particular order: An Ashton double bill of The Dream and Daphnis and Chloe (imho the most beautiful hour of music ever written!) Manon Symphony in C Concerto Anything by Forsythe The first revival of The Cellist

I finally got to see Ashton's Cinderella on Thursday night and it was well worth the long wait. As a result I have a couple contributions to the ongoing debates around this production which I hope won't be too controversial. Firstly I loved Kristen McNally and Christina Arestis as the stepsisters. After a slightly slow start I really began to believe them as the slightly annoying elder sisters I never had (I just had slightly annoying elder brothers!), and the point where Cinderella made up with them at the end as a result felt very touching. The only productions of Cinderella I've seen before were the Wheeldon one (seen with Dutch National Ballet and ENB), the BRB Bintley one, and the Ratmansky version seen on Blu Ray, and all three of those productions had female sisters. My only exposure to Ashton's version prior to last night was the recently issued DVD with Sibley and Dowell that had Ashton and Helpmann as the sisters, and I have to admit that I found them somewhat tedious and decidedly anachronistic. They came over as caricatures, but to my mind McNally and Arestis turned them into characters. My probably minority thoughts therefore are that I wish Kevin O'Hare had bitten the bullet and cast the majority of the performances with females in the stepsister roles (as had been Ashton's original intention) rather than the majority male casting that we're seeing in this run of performances. Secondly, to enter the Mark Monaghan/Hayward debate, when I saw that the ballet was being revived and knowing that, owing to my location, I would only be able to see one performance, my immediate thought was that I would like to see Francesca Hayward as I thought she would be perfect in this particular role. I'm sure all the other Cinderellas have their merits - I would have loved to have seen them all, and I'm really sorry not to have seen Marianela in the gala (sadly my bank balance couldn't stretch that far!), but I'm so glad my decision didn't prove to be a mistake. I felt Hayward simply glowed in this role and Alexander Campbell to me is her perfect partner, not just physically in terms of height but in terms of empathy. Having seen them also recently in Sleeping Beauty, I really do think that they fit together well. All in all then, a big thumbs up to me for this production, for the sets, for the lighting (apart from the overture where I got a spotlight shining right in my eyes), for the costumes, for the orchestra and most of all for the dancers.

You possibly mean Hulme Hall, and yes that very much still exists. Port Sunlight is such a beautiful place, and the Lady Lever Gallery is a must for anyone who loves the Pre Raphaelites. It’s all about 25 minutes drive up the Wirral from where I live

I saw the last performance of the Sheffield run last night at the Lyceum, combining it with visits to some of my old undergraduate haunts! I saw the same cast as MaddieRose and echo everything she said. I hadn't seen The Great Gatsby before and I wasn't sure if I would like the complete ballet, but I very much loved it! I just thought I'd make a few general observations to add to hers 1 Though they haven't been called Northern Ballet Theatre for some time I love how the emphasis is still very much on theatre. Whether they're dancing works by David Nixon, Kenneth Tindall or Cathy Marston each movement the dancers make has a meaning in terms of the overall plot whilst remaining pure dance. They are all such good dance actors, especially in this show Rachael Gillespie as the ill-fated Myrtle and Harris Beattie as her angst-ridden husband George. 2 The music made me realise what an undervalued composer Richard Rodney Bennett was. I really liked how they matched the varied styles that he composed in to different types of scene. For the love scenes there were extracts from the romantic scores he wrote for films like Murder on the Orient Express and Nicholas and Alexandra. For the sultry Myrtle and George scenes there were the full-blown jazz workouts of his Jazz Calendar suite, and finally for the dramatic scenes in the second act where the plot well and truly thickened there were extracts from his much more spiky avant-garde concert hall works like the Concerto for Percussion. 3 These days Northern Ballet may be Made in Leeds, but in terms of conducting they're very much still Made in Manchester. I really enjoyed the conducting of the latest product of the inestimable Royal Northern College of Music conductor's course to head over the Pennines, Lauren Wasnyczuk, following in the recent footsteps of Jonathan Lo, Daniel Parkinson and Ellie Slorach. 4 Memo to self - don't travel 70+ miles to see a show on the night clocks go forward, especially on a night they closed the M56. I think this may have been the first night I actually saw the time flick forward from 1am to 2am on my phone!

I saw this afternoon’s matinée performance of Woolf Works and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s one thing or another for me with McGregor’s ballets - I either love them or hate them. So for example, Dante Project and Chroma - definite thumbs up, Carbon Life and Obsidian Tear - not so much. Woolf Works is definitely in the love category however, and seeing it during its first run changed the course of my PhD that I was a couple of years into at the time by exposing me to the work of Virginia Woolf. I was was looking at the way the real world is described in fiction and I ended up using a couple of excerpts from Mrs Dalloway to try and prove that Woolf was just as good a describer of a subjective reality as writers such as Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley were of an objective reality. They just came at it from different directions. I found that McGregor captured this perfectly in the first section of Woolf Works, and my two subsequent viewings, both as with the first viewing starring the luminous Alessandra Ferri (who appears to be ageless), have only intensified that feeling. I get the same feeling in the final section and both these sections always bring me to tears, especially the moment in the first section leading up to Septimus Smith leaping off the balcony and the moment in the third section where Ferri stands still as Gillian Anderson reads out Woolf’s unbearably sad suicide note. I’m still not quite on board with the second section, though it always looks great, but it’s always the bit where I feel my concentration wavering. However, Orlando is the one out of the three novels that I haven’t yet read so maybe that might help with the interpretation. My evening’s entertainment at Sadler’s Wells was just the tonic I needed after the melancolia of Woolf Works. What a programme Tiler Peck’s Turn it Out was - an hour and a half of full-on enjoyment, and what a dancer she is!! I really must save up to go back to New York and see her again before she retires. Great to see both of these in one day!!

Absolutely! I don’t think I’ve smiled so much in a theatre for ages!!

I agree that the programme looks much more intriguing than this season’s. Interesting that after December 2nd there’s nothing outside London - I for one would have loved to have seen Giselle in Liverpool. Given the drop in Arts Council funding was this maybe inevitable?

Yes, I was - just driven the 80 odd miles home. It was quite a night - Brandon Lawrence was impeccable as always but Semionova was just wonderful. Graceful and pure in the white acts (though her tempi were very slow!) and downright evil in Act 3. Huge shout out for the corps of swans - the opening of Act 4 with the swans rising from the mist brought gasps from the audience and a spontaneous round of applause. Also impressed yet again with Riku Ito as Benno - he is such a good acquisition. There was a very good pre-performance event as well with Jonathan Payn interviewing Daria Stanciulescu and newly promoted (and still quite emotional!) Lachlan Monaghan, before dashing off to get ready to play Rothbart

Here in Chester we got everything without interruption - I think they may have been telling you porkies! And yes, wasn’t it wonderful?! When I saw it live I was up in the amphitheatre and wasn’t 100% convinced by it, but seeing it up close on the screen the excellence of Wheeldon’s storytelling came through loud and clear.

If anyone's interested, Tiler Peck is featured in the latest episode of the NYCB podcast City Ballet, talking to Jared Angle about Balanchine's Allegro Brillante - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/city-ballet-the-podcast/id1479330738?i=1000594647387 You can actually see her dancing the whole piece on YouTube where somebody has posted the video of it that NYCB put out during the first lockdown. Watching it again it's definitely become one of my favourite Balanchine pieces!

Vienna State Ballet were prominently featured today as always in the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Day concert from the Musikverein this morning. There was a waltz and a polka in the main body of the concert and a lovely dance for five couples set against the Blue Danube in the encores, all beautifully choreographed by Ashley Page in sumptuous settings. Presumably it'll be avallable on iPlayer for the normal length of time!

He’d obviously had a word with conductor Barry Wordsworth because there was a much bigger orchestral accelerando than usual at the end of the solo. Quite exciting!

The concert is being recorded by the BBC for broadcast on December 15th, and obviously BBC Sounds thereafter

If any of you are in or around Manchester this week and want a Sleeping Beauty fix, then Mark Elder will be conducting the Hallé in his own personal selection of music from the ballet (sadly sans dancers!) at the Bridgewater Hall this afternoon (Wednesday 30th) at 2.15pm, and also on Thursday 1st December at 7.30 and Sunday 4th December at 4pm. The programme also includes Samuel Barber’s Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, an extract from a ballet score that he apparently wrote for Martha Graham. I’m going this afternoon and I’m really interested to see what Sir Mark selects from Sleeping Beauty and whether his favourite bits are the same as mine!

This looks really interesting! I’m in London on the 11th for the Woolf Works matinée so it looks like my evening is sorted.

I know it’s not strictly ballet related but if any of you are concerned about the plight of ENO you might be interested in signing this petition - https://chng.it/NDtZmjKQyG P.S. The petition was started by Bryn Terfel!

Ditto! I know Mr Macaulay is far more qualified to write about dance than me, and that any person’s response to any piece of art is individual, but what he describes bears no relation to the programme myself and a large Birmingham Hippodrome audience gave vociferous approval to a week or so ago. Never mind - I guess it means I’m a Philistine. I think his comment that Carlos Acosta has ‘still achieved relatively little’ at BRB should also not go unchallenged. I’m sure Carlos would be the first to admit he hasn’t done as much as he would have wanted, but hey, there’s been a pandemic. In the meantime a glorious new Don Quixote, the introduction of a number of works from choreographers from Europe and Latin America new to the company, several exciting new commissions that carry on the Ballet Now initiative that David Bintley started, including Will Tuckett’s wonderful Lazuli Sky, an increased online presence in terms of talks, discussions and filmed rehearsals à la RB, and a general revitalisation of the company will be enough to be going on with for me!

I drove to yesterday evening's performance from Chester and just as when I went to the Into the Music programme last weekend it was fine until the last three or four miles. The centre of Birmingham really seems to crucify traffic at the moment, and getting from the Mailbox car park to the A38 after the show was somewhat akin to finding your way through the Hampton Court maze! Totally agree with what you say about last night's show though - Miki Mizutani and Mathias Dingman were both wonderful throughout. The biggest shout of the night however was for Riku Ito in the Call to Arms section. His acquisition from Northern Ballet looks like it's going to pay dividends! I also loved Yijing Zhang as Prayer - just beautiful.

Not quite everyone - certainly not me! For me the mark of a good work is when you’re still thinking through it days after seeing it. It’s a work that will live with me for a long time, especially the beautiful 2nd movement. I think it’ll outlast any adverse criticism, no matter how distinguished its source.

I attended the pre-show talk on Friday where Tamarin Stott talked about the way the work came together. Apparently the choreography is very much collaborative effort between 'Jess' and 'Morgs' even though individually they have very different styles. Tamarin talked about the intense huddles they would have when trying to solve a particularly knotty choreographic problem.

I noticed that nobody seemed to have commented on Scottish Ballet’s new production of Coppélia, either in its first run at the Edinburgh Festival or on its subsequent Scottish tour, so I thought I’d better remedy that! I saw two of the last four performances of the run at the wonderful Eden Court Theatre on the banks of the River Ness in Inverness, surely the furthest north full-scale ballet is ever performed in the UK! This new Coppélia, choreographed by the duo of Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple, aka Jess and Morgs, is a completely new take 150 years on from the original ballet, but the spirit of that original lives on not just in the names of the main characters but in the essence of the story. In this version, Coppélia is not an automaton, but piece of artificial intelligence, an avatar if you will, created by the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dr Coppelius, reminiscent of Elon Musk even down to the model rocket he keeps on his desk. Swanhilda and her fiancé Franz are investigative reporters sent to Coppelius’ ‘NuLife’ company HQ to interview him and to try and uncover the secret of what he is up to. He demonstrates an early version of the Coppélia avatar which ends in an embarrassing malfunction but not before Franz, as in the original, has taken a shine to her. Swanhilda interviews Coppelius and they clash over the ethics of creating artificial life that mimics human behaviour. The couple are invited to spend the night at the facility but Swanilda decides to leave Franz sleeping and goes off to investigate the facility and discovers the room where a number of the avatars are kept. She brings them to life with a remote and marvels at the range and subtlety of their movements. She discovers the interface and finds that she can enter into it and inhabit the Coppélia avatar. Meanwhile, Coppelius, frustrated at the failure of his demonstration, finds Franz wandering the facility in search of Coppélia and offers him a drugged drink, believing, again as in the original, that he can use his life force to make the avatar more lifelike. He hooks up the sleeping Franz to effect the transfer. Within the avatar, Swanilda sees this happening and fools Coppelius into thinking he has been successful in a long duet in which Coppelius is essentially seduced by her. All of the other avatars, dressed identically to Coppélia be they male or female dancers, appear out of the interface and dance with Swanilda/Coppélia. Finally, Coppelius, dazed and confused by what he has seen, is pulled into the interface by Swanilda who shows him she was driving Coppélia all along. She escapes the interface, leaving Coppelius stuck in virtual reality, and is reconciled with Franz for a final, slightly reluctant duet. I thought I’d better give that brief synopsis because it shows that in essence it still is the story of Coppélia that we know and love, and I have to say I really loved the production. Not least of its virtues is its dazzling use of technology, using computer graphics, as well as pre-recorded video and output from a hand-held camera carried round the stage by one of the dancers that is projected onto the screens and the back and sides of the stage. There are minimal props, but from time to time a pod is pushed onto the stage that doubles as Coppelius’ office and Franz and Swanilda’s bedroom. The pod is pushed round and round while the action is taking place within it, which along with the video from the camera gives the audience a fully-immersive 360 degree view of what is going on. The music pays homage to Delibes’ original in much the same way as the score for ENB’s Giselle pays homage to Adam’s score, mixing it with elements of electronic music and full-on dance music. One nice touch was when at one point Coppelius entered the stage engaging in a bout of ‘boxercise’ with the orchestra apparently playing the Act 1 mazurka, only for it to be revealed when he took one of them out that he was listening to a recording through his Airpods! The dancing gave me lots of echoes of other contemporary works I have seen: the scenes of the facility staff working reminded me of NB’s 1984, the two interviews between Swanilda and Coppelius, where the dancers move to the soundtrack of a real interview voiced by actors, is similar to Crystal Pite’s The Statement, and a party that Swanilda and Franz gatecrash is very like Forsyte’s Playlist. Overall the dance style is in the MacGregor ball park, contemporary but with hints of classicism, especially towards the end where Coppélia and the female avatars dance on pointe. Seeing two performaces I was hoping I would see two casts to contrast and compare, but interestingly, although there are three different casts, all the shows at each venue appear to be being danced by the same cast. Logistically this seems to make sense, as each cast needs to match up with the pre-recorded video that was shot of them, and only having one set of videos to worry about at each venue makes things easier. That meant that at both performances I got to see Jerome Barnes as Franz, Bruno Macchiardi as Coppelus, and artist Anna Williams as Swanilda. Despite a couple of asynchronous interactions with her pre-recorded self, Williams was simply wonderful, channelling her inner Lois Lane as the dogged investigative reporter. Her duet with the marvellous oily Coppelius of Macchiardi was the highlight of the show, though her duets with Barnes’ suitably dopey Franz were touching. The corps, as always with Scottish Ballet, were superb, whether they were playing keen young employees of Coppelius or robotic avatars. Both nights the audience absolutely loved it, with spontaneous standing ovations both times. It’s definitely a production that should make it south of the border, hopefully not just to Sadler’s Wells but also venues further north - I feel sure it would go down a storm at the Lowry! As it is Scotland has had a treat over the last few months. I’m so glad I included Inverness in the itinerary for my autumn mini-break, though there were times on Thursday when I was battling over Rannoch Moor in a biblical rainstorm that I feared I would be washed away. But I made it and I have to say that Inverness is a wonderful city and Eden Court is a lovely theatre worthy of any ballet lover’s attention. Maybe have a nice winter break there to coincide with SB’s Snow Queen in January!