Sebastian

Les Patineurs / Winter Dreams / The Concert - 18 December 2018, 7.30pm 

I have two e-tickets for sale Amphi Sides Row B. Will sell separately. 

Please PM as well as posting here if interested. Thanks!

Here is an extract from a memoir by Joseph Wechsberg (the writer and opera-lover probably best known for his lovely book “Looking For A Bluebird”) who writes in “The Vienna I Knew” of his first visit to the Vienna Opera in 1923:

”The audience was incredible. Fat men and vulgar women in the boxes, overdressed and unkempt...They talked and coughed through the arias. During the intermission following the first act, when most people remained in their seats, I watched an improbable couple in the parterre box next to me. They opened small packages containing rolls with sausage, peeled the sausage skins off with their teeth, and threw the skins into the stalls. A man in front of me got angry and threw the skins back at them, and everybody laughed...The real opera lovers were up in the galleries, but I didn’t know it then.”

7 hours ago, alison said:

Although the implication is that they won't specifically be answering correspondence, just making sure it gets to the "right" people ...

That is not what they said to me. Nor is it what I wrote (apologies if there was a different “implication”, I tried to report as clearly as I could):

>>The ROH say that once an email is logged, it is the responsibility of the new centralised service department to chase down whoever is responsible for giving a detailed reply and ensure that they do so within a reasonable time. 

By “ensure that they do so within a reasonable time” I meant ensure that the correct person replies within a reasonable time. I hope all is clear now as this sounds like a significant improvement. Time will tell. 

13 hours ago, penelopesimpson said:

I find managements attitude in all this somewhat surprising.  Apart from those stupid comments made by the Chairman, we've heard remarkably little from anyone.  I often think the MD is a silent partner.  Whenever I have complained to staff on the night they have told me to write in.  And they don't seem to be making that comment simply to make me go away, its more that nobody is taking any notice of what they report back.

Might it be appropriate to repeat an earlier post here?

http://www.balletcoforum.com/topic/19046-a-new-system-for-complaints-concerns-and-questions-at-the-roh/

According to what I have been told, yes the ROH is now set up to deal with this sort of thing. 

A recent failed booking - mishandled first by the Royal Opera House's technology and then by its staff - has over the last weeks drawn me into an extended correspondence with various members of ROH staff. Somewhat to my surprise, the final outcome turns out to be wholly positive, not just for me in this particular case but for customers of the ROH more generally. 

It turns out that there is a new way to contact ROH with complaints, concerns or questions. As of very recently there is now a central place for us to contact ROH by email: 

customerservices@roh.org.uk

It may be that some recent frustrations are down either to the previous clumsy systems or to teething troubles in putting the new system into place. But whatever happened in the past, ROH now promise that irrespective of the nature of the enquiry - security, clumsy front of house, the dodgy website, a failed booking, the printing of the new programmes, stupid statements by ROH staff, the cost/benefit of the catering, or whatever - this email address is the place to write to. The ROH say that once an email is logged, it is the responsibility of the new centralised service department to chase down whoever is responsible for giving a detailed reply and ensure that they do so within a reasonable time. 

This is new, so there are bound to be a few stumbles as the system gets bedded down, but it makes much more sense than the piecemeal and rather disorganised ways things were dealt with in the past. This thread could be a place to report back what is - or isn't - working. I for one am pleased with things so far.

In case people haven’t followed the news, Yasmine Naghdi is dancing this performance instead of Hayward:

http://www.balletcoforum.com/topic/18245-royal-ballet-20182019-winter-season-casting/?do=findComment&comment=265070

I am now selling two Row B Amphi tickets for Wednesday 13 February 2019, 7.30pm:

Asphodel Meadows / The Two Pigeons

£11 each. Will sell separately.

Please PM if interested

Bumping up the tickets for Tuesday 12 February (Frankie's Two Pigeons) as they are still available

Ticket now spoken for

One ticket £11 for tonight - Amphi Row E - RB Triple Bill - E-ticket.

Please send me a PM. 

Two tickets for February 12 Royal Ballet School - The Two Pigeons (Hayward / Bracewell)

Amphi Row C  - £11 each. E-tickets. Please PM if interested. 

Both tickets gone now. 

Very sadly I can’t now make the first night of the Unknown Soldier triple bill (+Infra +Symphony in C), tomorrow Tuesday 20.11.

Two seats, will sell separately, Row B Amphi, £11. 

PM if interested. Tickets will otherwise go back to the Box Office first thing tomorrow Tuesday.

Yes please! I’ll PM you now.

I'll happily take one Alice-Faye, will send PM now. 

3 hours ago, Fonty said:

It would be a bit boring if every classical ballet was inspected by the PC brigade.  I can just imagine it.  Get rid of all that royalty, it is offensive to republicans, represents a time when the masses were repressed and starving, and those palace settings only serve to show the complete waste of money.  Get rid of tutus, it is sexist to have the girls flashing their thighs and showing their gussets to the audience, and objectifies women.  Get rid of all those ballets that show the female succumbing to the evil charms of a male, and requiring another man to rescue her.

Fonty, indeed, this has been tried. In the appendix to Tim Scholl's "Sleeping Beauty: A Legend in Progress" (2004) we find an account of a 1924 Soviet attempt to rewrite the Sleeping Beauty as part of the "creation of works of revolutionary content". This ended with the monarchy overthrown and Aurora anointed as the “wonderful dawn of Universal Revolution”. They called it The Sunny Commune. It seems it was never staged.

Ticket gone to the Box Office

Available, a spare ticket in the Upper Slips for tomorrow Tuesday night, Bayadere. BB2, £8. 

I am sitting in BB1, so it will be easy to hand over the ticket. 

I'll send you a PM now

On 26/10/2018 at 10:05, Fiz said:

I was reading the 2017 book Twilight of Empire by Greg King and Penny Wilson. It is the book to get about Mayerling if you are interested in the subject. They have uncovered so much new information including letters which were thought to have been destroyed previously. Nearly everything I have read and quoted here is wrong. It’s a fabulous book.

Thank you so much Fiz for pointing to this book. It has had next to no attention in the UK to date (no reviews, so far as I know) and I didn’t know about it. As someone who spends several weeks every year near Mayerling, has a collection of books on the subject and indeed is a close friend of one of the last people left alive to have seen Mary Vetsera’s remains (those who know the various theories will appreciate the importance of, for example, her skull) I was eager to get a copy as soon as you posted about it. 

Having now read the book I completely agree with your assessment. I urge anyone with an interest in the historical subject to ignore what has been written previously - which is anyway well summarised in the book, the authors seem to have read absolutely everything - and jump to this easy-to-read, short yet scholarly work. Probably the last word. 

Incidentally, although it is no great secret, I am always amused that Countess Larisch later became friends with T S Eliot. In fact she turns up in his poem The Waste Land. 

Ticket just returned to box office

For sale one Mayerling ticket, this Saturday 13 October 7pm, front amphi seat (row C): £18.

I'll be at the performance so just let me know asap if interested (this is going back to the Box Office on Thursday if no takers)

Here is a catalogue entry from the NYPL showing the Sleeping Beauty films of Victor Jessen (1949 and 1950s, with Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann, Michael Somes, Beryl Grey, Frederick Ashton, Brian Shaw and many others, including good footage of the classical dancing of Kenneth MacMillan):

https://catalog.nypl.org/search~S1?/Xjessen+victor+beauty&searchscope=1&SORT=DZ/Xjessen+victor+beauty&searchscope=1&SORT=DZ&extended=0&SUBKEY=jessen+victor+beauty/1%2C4%2C4%2CB/frameset&FF=Xjessen+victor+beauty&searchscope=1&SORT=DZ&4%2C4%2C

I understand these films were shown at the RAD and was just wondering if there are any ways of seeing them in the UK?

Here is an extract from the diary of the veteran of the London stage, the actor William Charles Macready, describing the audience at his performance of Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House, New York, in 1849, an event which resulted in one of the worst riots in theatre history:

"I went on; they would not let me speak. The roar of insults that greeted my entrance was so deafening, that the play continued in dumb show. Copper cents were thrown, some struck me, four or five eggs, a great many apples, lemons, pieces of wood, nearly, if not quite, a whole peck of potatoes. A chair was thrown on to the stage, another into the orchestra pit, which made the remaining musicians move out...I flung my whole soul into every word I uttered while all around dreadful deeds of outrage were roaring within our ears. The death of Macbeth was loudly cheered. Suddenly soldiers were brought in and began firing indiscriminately. Several people, at least twenty-two perished. And so it was with immediate haste, that I quit the New York stage".