Dawnstar

Does anyone know which of the headshots in this article belong to the 6 dancers joining the RB? It would be nice to know what they look like to try to spot them in the ensemble next season. (The headshots are clearly not in the order of the list of names.)

@LinMM I was thinking of the possibility of signalling or suchlike in London being disrupted. Hopefully it won't be. I'm currently waiting to find out how disruptive the 20th July strike date will be but I'm not holding out much hope I'll be able to make it to London that day. Fortunately I don't have anything booked on 22nd or 29th. I hope you enjoy your time in Cambridge.

TfL strikes announced for at the end of this month, dates including some of the Carlos At 50 performances. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66127959 I hope it'll only affect the tube & not trains coming into London. I can easily walk from Kings Cross or Liverpool Street to the ROH but I can't walk all the way from Cambridge!

Eleven promotions from Artist to First Artist seems a lot. If my maths is correct (which it probably isn't!), there will be 23 First Artists compared to 16 Artists next season. Having more First Artists than Artists seems unusual. Is it? Among the eleven promotions, I'm particularly pleased to see Liam Boswell (although now the website biographies are restored, I see his fails to list him having danced Hans-Peter, which considering it's his largest role to date seems rather a significant omission).

Same here. Looking at those prices actually makes me feel slightly sick at how much they have risen in only a few years. Maybe it would have been better if I hadn't decided to give that 2018 Mayerling a go & I was still only going to the ROH for occasional operas.

@zxDaveM While I agree with your overall point, I would like to say that there are some people who get hooked at a younger age. I first went to the ROH in 2004, a few weeks before I turned 19, to see Der Rosenkavalier, still my favourite opera. I've been every season since & next season will be my 20th anniversary (only seeing opera until 2018, then I added ballet). And that was without any ticket incentives as back then all they did was student standby on the day, which I couldn't make use of because I was at university in Bristol and last minute train fares to London were far too expensive. I am very envious of younger people nowadays with all their cheap tickets.

I've just dug out my 2019 Don Q order & found I paid £60 for stalls circle B93, which has gone up to £67 this time around, although the seats next to it from B92 have gone up to £83 (I don't know for sure if they were all the same price in 2019 but usually the whole row B bench is the same price). I'm not surprised that there would have been complaints. That price was ludicrous for the view in my opinion. I only sat in row C for Cinderella - as it was bad enough having to pay £70, I certainly couldn't afford £112 - but for Mayerling I was in row B for one performance (£75) with the rest in row C (£58). I thought the view in row B was really very little better than that of row C. The £17 price difference between the two rows for Mayerling was perhaps just about justifiable for the difference in view but I really do not think the £42 price difference for Cinderella would have been at all justified by the minimal difference in view. And that's before getting into paying £112 for sitting on a not very padded bench seat with no arms and, depending your neighbours, the risk of having an uncomfortably squashed evening. In fact from a comfort point of view I would say row C is marginally better than row B because with there only being 5 people to a bench before an aisle you are less likely to be uncomfortably squashed than in the 12-spaces row B bench. Also in row C there's no risk of getting kicked in your lower back by the person behind you, which I've had happen in row B before as the gap between the seat & back of the row B bench is at foot height for row C.

Gosh, that will be quite the height difference between the partners!

Wouldn't that please the ROH though? If none of the regulars book standing tickets then they can get in more of those new audience members that they're obsessed with!

I'll assume the prices will be going up then.... Mind you, if they are using the opera price structure rather than the ballet price structure for Don Q, as has been speculated upthread, then row C side stalls circle should be cheaper relative to the top price. Those seats are usually cheaper for opera than for ballet despite the restricted view being (usually) more significant for ballet than for opera.

That is very surprising. Yes, for SB & Cinderella they were £70. I had assumed they would be whacked up even more for this coming season.

If it's going to be £26 to stand in the stalls circle then I'm dreading finding out how much it's going to cost those of us who want to sit in the stalls circle....

Quite the revolving door of Werthers! Could the ROH not find any tenors who were available for more than one date?

I hope they sort out Don Q soon so they remove the alert from all over the website. I tried to save last night's cast sheet to a .pdf only to find the alert was even showing up on that. As I don't want to save the alert for posterity, I hope it goes soon so I can download a normal cast sheet.

I was at the side of the stalls circle, which I know isn't the best place accoustically for voices but everyone else seemed to come over the orchestra alright so I don't think it was just the accoustics there. I do rather wish Werther didn't have such a big gap between the uses of what I think if by far the loveliest melody. It first appears towards the end of Act I & then not again until Act IV. (Admittedly it's a shorter wait than in the Ring cycle, where my favourite Leitmotif appears in Walkure Act III & then not again until the very end of Gotterdammerung!) Its reappearance in Act IV brought tears to my eyes, having prior to that been feeling a bit unmoved by the situation playing out.

In case anyone's interested, a few curtain call photos from tonight's Werther with Florez. He must have a picture in the attic because he barely looks any older than when I first saw him at the ROH 16 years ago! I thought he was visually ideal as Werther. Unfortunately not quite vocally ideal, as he did get drowned out by the orchestra at their louder moments. Whether it would have helped if the orchestra had turned it down a bit, as presumably they had rehearsed for Kauffmann-volume levels rather than Florez-volume levels, or whether his voice is inherently too small for the role I'm not sure. I'd still rather see him than Kaufmann though, as I can overlook moments of less than ideal vocals more easily than an entire evening of less than ideal visuals. Now if you could have Kauffmann's voice of a decade ago in Florez's body that might be the idea Werther!

So that would make her about 5 foot 10 & presumably that's not en pointe so add another 4 inches at least when she's en pointe. That would make her taller when en pointe than any male dancer I can think of bar Reece Clarke. Presumably Gareth Haw must be well over 6 foot if he's able to partner her but what would happen if he's injured? How many of the current ENB reasonably senior men would be tall enough? It's difficult to judge heights at a distance on stage but there aren't many that I would guess are over 6 foot.

Apropos the cast sheet, has Gina Storm-Jensen done Lady Montague before? I've seen her as Rosaline & a Harlot but not as Lady Montague.

Well, it could be if they accidentally price the tickets more cheaply than intended when they finally go online. Back in December I was doing Friday rush for the Nutcracker & found tickets that should have been £64 had been put on sale for only £48! Someone had evidently put them online at the wrong price.

I may have just succumbed to temptation & snapped up a seat for tomorrow evening....!

I wouldn't say I only see ENB for Frola but if I can only see one cast in a production then I'll book for his cast. It's not just the cost of seeing more than one cast but that most of ENB's runs are so short that seeing more than one or at most two performances is difficult. It's actually worked out pretty well in terms of seeing a variety of ENB's female dancers over the last few years, as I've seen him with McWhinney (Manon), Hawes (Cinderella), Takahashi (Corsaire & Cinderella), Oliveira (Raymonda) and Conway (Nutcracker), plus the guesting Salenko in Swan Lake. On the subject of guesting, I wonder who Summerscales will partner when she returns. I'd be interested in seeing her, as I've not seen her dance before since she had left ENB before I first saw them in recent years.

I was wondering that, having looked up all the incoming dancers up on the Semperoper Ballett Dresden website & seen a photo of them together. Basically I'm wondering if she's short enough to partner Frola, because if she's too tall for him then I probably won't be seeing a lot of her!

I'm afraid I'd not heard of her before. Do you know what sort of height she is? I'm wondering who she may be partnered with.

While I'm not surprised to see dancers accompanying Aaron Watkins from Dresden, I am surprised that the only dancer coming in at Lead Principal level is female. Surely it's male top level dancers that ENB needs more than female ones? With Hawes & Arrieta's promotions they now have 6 female Lead Principals, plus one female Principal, but only 2 male Lead Principals & no male Principals. At least Trossello has got a promotion but given he's danced the male lead in all 3 ballets this season I still think he should have been brought in at First Soloist level.

I'd prefer to see them on the cast sheet, so those of us who haven't forked out for the programme (were they really £12 or did I mis-over-hear?) can still see who they were.