Sebastian
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Posts
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Joined
Posts posted by Sebastian
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The critic Mark Ronan has posted my 2019 article about The Sleeping Beauty on his website (with permission from the Royal Opera House: the piece appeared in their programme for the latest revival). Perhaps people might like to have the link:-
https://www.markronan.com/2020/06/sleeping-beauty/
The article focuses on the first production in order to try and rediscover the original intentions of Petipa, Vsevolozhsky and Tchaikovsky. Although not mentioned in this short piece I also have a personal interest in such issues as tempi and choreographic style, the key research question for me being one of meaning, both of the Sleeping Beauty as a whole and also of the individual scenes, mimes, variations and so on.
Please note that the Royal Opera House did not allow me to write this article academically - with footnotes etc - and asked me just to assert my findings. This may be controversial (for example when I appear to contradict well-known books or leave out stories "everyone knows") but all is drawn from - mostly - primary sources.
I am looking for more material, specifically private documents (e.g. diaries, memoirs, correspondence) that might cast light on what was going on in St Petersburg and Paris around 1890. So if anyone knows of a family archive - even just forgotten papers in an attic somewhere - relating to Russia and/or France during the relevant period, I would be delighted to learn more.-
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In case anybody might be using this unusual period to declutter, I am looking for a few magazines for my research collection:
Dance & Dancers:
1956: February
1957: July / Sept / Nov
1958: Jan / Feb / March / April / May / June / Sept / Nov
1959: July / Sept / Oct
and various issues from 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963 and 1964Dance Now:
1/4, 9/1, 9/2, 12/1, 17/1, 17/2, 17/3
If anyone might be able to help - even just with a single copy they don't need - please feel free to send me a PM.
Many thanks.
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Ticket gone now
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(Bumping this up)
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Both tickets gone now
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10 hours ago, Anna C said:
This is another reason why I much prefer the more mature Gremins of Bennet Gartside and Gary Avis. I don’t know how much older than Tatiana Gremin is supposed to be (apologies for grammar, neither way seemed right) but it just makes so much more sense for there to be quite an age gap between the two.
This has been discussed before but if one goes by the text of the novel, Olga is 19, Tatiana 20, Onegin 26, and Lensky 18 when we first see them. Four years later we have the ball where Tatiana is married to Prince Gremin: he shares memories of their youthful pranks and adventures with Onegin (who by then is 30). This makes Gremin maybe a bit older (nobody says exactly by how much), maybe something like 35-40. So perhaps a ten year gap or so between him and Tatiana.
Tchaikovsky on the other hand needed a lower voice for the operatic Gremin, so people usually assume he is much older.-
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C34 now gone. C35 still available.
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(Just bouncing this up)
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Two tickets for Friday 28th February 7.30pm for sale.
Amphitheatre C34 and 35, £12 each.
Please PM if interested.
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2 minutes ago, Rob S said:
Do you mean the Cellist mixed bill?😃
Many thanks - changed now.
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E-ticket £6
Please PM if interested
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Tickets no longer available
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(Bumping this up as it's on Friday)
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1 hour ago, annamicro said:
Thank you 🙂, I saw your offer but unfortunately it's a little bit more than I want to spend (max 35 pounds).
Just sent you a PM.
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2 minutes ago, Jan McNulty said:
I think the Cranko Estate does not permit live screenings.
No idea what the situation is now but in 2004 London had a live screening of the Royal Ballet dancing Onegin, see here:-
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1 hour ago, Angela said:
Chapter 4, Stanza X:
Though belles had lost his adoration,
he danced attendance with the best;
1 hour ago, Angela said:The more you think Cranko is far from Pushkin, the more Pushkin you find in the ballet...
Many thanks Angela. Which translation is this?
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For sale: two side Row C Amphi tickets for 7.30pm Friday 21st February "Onegin" (Naghdi / Bonelli cast). £18 each.
E-tickets so can email.
Please PM if interested.
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12 minutes ago, Angela said:
I'm not so firm in the different Russian readings of "Eugene Onegin", but I think if you doubt even these words of Tatyana and her love for him, you have to read the whole book in a very cynical manner. I think Pushkin's hero is a very ambiguous character, purposely open to many different interpretations, and of of them is Cranko's Onegin. Haughty and ignorant, or just absent and distracted, absorbed in his inner conflict? Can he feel love or is it just delusion? "Bliss was so near", says Tatyana in stanza XLVII, I always thought these words are a key to Cranko's interpretation.
In Pushkin's stanza XLVI, by the way, we also find Tatyana's words how unhappy she is as a princess in St. Petersburg.
Very nicely put Angela. The book has the greatest spread of interpretative translations of any I know. If one checks the (many and various) versions of the poem in English - including the extraordinary one by Nabokov, so different to all others - one can see the considerable variety of meaning contained in Pushkin's work.
Beware all those, like myself, who don't have enough Russian to read the original in all its glory. Here for example is Kasper Holten - formerly of the ROH - on the challenge in relation to the opera:-
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jan/02/eugene-onegin-unchain-heart
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Just sent you a DM.
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This announcement of an upcoming exhibition and associated events is perhaps of interest. A leading figure in Austrian musical society, Arnold Rosé led the Vienna Philharmonic but was forced to live out his days in exile in London; Alma led the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz and perished in the camp. One of the events is an evening with Anita Lasker Wallfisch, the ‘cellist of Auschwitz’.
More here:
https://www.ram.ac.uk/museum/exhibition/only-the-violins-remain
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As the person who asked the question at the Insight evening about Tchaikovsky's metronome markings, might it help if I added some detail? We know about Tchaikovsky's and Petipa's intentions from the always impeccably researched and argued historiography of Prof Roland Wiley. In the notes to his wonderful book "Tchaikovsky's Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker" he tells us what we need to know.
Wiley examined a number of primary sources in the early 1980s, including the holograph score and the reduced rehearsal score for two violins (which has since disappeared). He argues convincingly that the numerous tempo markings he found derive, not from the time Tchaikovsky was composing the music, but later, from the period when Tchaikovsky and Petipa were rehearsing the work in the run-up to the first performance, and possibly yet later still. So the markings can be taken as an indication of the speeds the dancers of the time were performing to.
Musicologists are likely to continue to argue about individual tempi but the current general view is that, at least as regards late works such as Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky's metronome markings can be relied on. In any case such records as exist about Sleeping Beauty are reproduced by Wiley in his Appendix E. There is nothing for the Prologue but many metronome markings for the rest of the ballet. Well worth examining with a copy of the score and a metronome.
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Both tickets now spoken for
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As I now have to travel for business that week, I am selling two tickets in Row C of the Amphitheatre for the sold-out Swan Lake performance on Wednesday 11 March (Osipova/Hallberg cast). £30 each.
Will sell separately if enough people respond. Please PM if interested. Thanks!
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Ticket sold to Giselle21.
The Bluebird
in Performances seen & general discussions
Posted
What a good subject jonac, thank you for raising it. You might like to read yourself further into the stories: other d’Aulnoy characters appear in the ballet (the White Cat, for example). Not sure you have the dates exactly right though (1698 is the publication date more usually given for her work).
Christine A. Jones's scholarly introduction to "Mother Goose Refigured" (2016) is well worth searching out as it is up-to-date and deals with far more than just Perrault.