Lizbie1

2 minutes ago, bangorballetboy said:

I did last year when I bought a last minute ticket to see Madison Keesler.

I think you might be an unusual case

15 minutes ago, alison said:

This is ridiculous.  Now 50-odd tickets for each of today's and tomorrow's matinee are showing up.  I wonder how many people are going to be able to just take an afternoon out and go at such short notice?  If these *are* agency/group booking returns, then surely they ought to be returned to the theatre say 7 days before the performance, to give people a chance?  If not all the tickets are sold, presumably it's ENB which doesn't benefit.

Wow, that really is silly - how on earth can that many weekday matinee tickets be sold at a few hours' notice?

Naghdi/Ball and Hayward/Sambe here. This is one of the few occasions when I envy Londoners - I don't think there's a cast I wouldn't want to catch.

Ticket now sold.

I have a ticket for the above bill on 19th October which I now can't use; as with the Judas Tree/Song of the Earth one I've also advertised here it's a very good value £6 ticket - Amphitheatre Right A79.

Please DM me if interested.

I have a ticket for the above bill on 1st November which I now can't use: it's a very good value £6 ticket - Amphitheatre Right A78.

Please DM me if interested.

45 minutes ago, capybara said:

The Times' Debra Craine was there and has written at some length ( 4 ****) under a photo of Xander Parish and Yasmine Naghdi in the Sylvia pas de deux.

Crikey - it's pretty unusual for Debra Craine to leave London, major festivals excepted.  If I were BRB or NB I'd be a bit miffed that it took the RB to get the Times to travel for dance (something that mystifies me when their national coverage of other art forms is really very good).

Is it possible she'll be covering? 

I'd also argue that the Bolshoi doesn't present much of a model for exemplary management/employee relations and harmonious internal politics.

I'm not a natural anti-clericist, but on balance I found the Russian church a pretty sinister force when I lived there and it appears it's got worse since. (It doesn't help that certain politicians are happy to exploit it for their own ends.)

Are SCS tickets never allocated to agencies? I don't normally stand but during the Mariinsky season, when I did, I overheard some tourists discussing when they'd bought their (very prime) SCS tickets - one had had hers the week before and I got the impression it was through an agency. Of course, it may have been an unofficial one...

16 hours ago, cavycapers said:

I am now getting infuriated by the sellong of the Concerto / Le Baiser de la fée / Elite Syncopations tickets for 18th/19th October.  Since general booking opened with only a handful of tickets at the back of the amphi, there has been a release every couple of weeks of 50 or so tickets for each night.  Why is this happening?  What i find so infuriating is that i bought tickets at general booking at the back of the amphi, thinking nothing else would be available, and then it's maddening to keep habing to exchange them as better tickets are trickled onto the site.  Very annoyed 

 

All i would like to have is clarification for the policy for the selling of tickets, which seems to differ for each production, on which i can base my buying.

 

I have no inside knowledge but I suspect it's the ROH's officially sanctioned agencies returning unsold tickets to the box office, as they are contractually entitled (any normal punter who is re-selling their own tickets via the box office gets told that unsold tickets and agency returns take precedence). It happens pretty much routinely but it's more conspicuous this time.

I'm not crazy about the practice and I don't personally see the need for agencies' involvement these days - I only hope the ROH makes more on agency sales than those put through its own box office, perhaps through some kind of retainer.

Personally speaking, while I'm not a huge fan of McGregor and, as I've mentioned above, I'm not happy with some of the more extreme extensions on display in Infra, I think that as a piece of choreography it would stand on its own merits.

In my view the projections enhance the piece; they are not necessary for it to succeed (indeed I believe they aren't even visible from a number of seats, though as with certain opera directors that might be down to an absence of consideration for those in the cheap seats).

Yes, sorry, apologies to both!

Sim, that's a good point: I haven't paid close enough attention to Bolshoi politics to know whether the apparent reliance on recruitment from St Petersburg is a symptom or a cause. I just think it a great shame.

21 minutes ago, Shade said:

I think the Bolshoi may have the edge at the moment with the younger dancers, many of whom have joined from the Vaganova school.

We'll probably differ in this, but I don't see that as a good thing! The Bolshoi ballerinas I've most enjoyed in the last 12 years or so (Osipova, Alexandrova, Kaptsova and Shipulina come to mind) were all Moscow-trained, or at least Moscow-"finished".

I'm in no way disparaging the Vaganova school (who would dare?), I just believe in horses for courses: the Bolshoi style and repertoire that I knew and loved demands something different of its dancers.

I agree with MAB - I was woefully out of the Bolshoi loop between leaving Moscow in 2005 and last year's tour (circumstances dictated a long break from serious ballet-going) and was surprised by the change in them and at how little enjoyment I took from the performances I saw: I couldn't reconcile them with the glowing reviews.

Previously I suppose I'd always considered myself Team Bolshoi, but now I'd rather see the Mariinsky any day of the week.  I'll still be present and correct in 2019, though as MAB says Kaptsova and Alexandrova will be sorely missed.

Or maybe it's me that's changed!

An emphatic vote for Fille here: I took my rather wriggly 7 year old niece to a matinee at ROH last year and while I can't claim she sat perfectly still throughout - I hope a certain amount of leeway is given at a Fille matinee - she loved both the auditorium and the ballet and her attention was held ("I wasn't bored!" she was surprised to report to her father).

I think she was a bit disappointed that the pony didn't disgrace himself during that particular performance, mind.

It looks like I'm back up on my broadband now. I hope fellow sufferers follow swiftly.

As an experiment I installed a different, new, browser and got the same 123 page.  It looks like I and others are victims of ISP caching and we're pretty much stuck with it until our ISPs decide to empty their caches

Delving a bit deeper into it, the site DNS record might have quite a long TTL value set to it, which could explain why some of us continue to have problems - perhaps that's something to be reconsidered.

Well this is interesting... the problem seems to be specific to my home broadband now. I've been accessing the site via my phone this evening without a hitch until I arrived home, at which point I got the 123 page. I cleared the cache to no avail, but as soon as I tried switching to 4G I got straight back onto the site.

For what it's worth I just tried re-starting my router and that didn't help. Anyone have any ideas? I'm fresh out of them.

Yes, darkish turquoise. The total commitment mentioned above was possibly too apparent.

So glad I stuck with Shklyarov for my Bayadere: I thought he was just fabulous.

I would venture to suggest, though, that his Act 3 costume could do with being a different colour!

Vaziev told the Kommersant last year that the Bolshoi's next tour would likely be in 2019: http://www.ismeneb.com/blogs-list/160819-vaziev-reflects-after-london-tour.html.

Thanks - I'll try that later. Clearing cookies is usually my last resort as it's such a pain to log in to everything again and clearing the cache really ought to do the trick in most cases.