bangorballetboy

2 minutes ago, MaddieRose said:

Just had an email to say Joonhyuk Jun is replacing Marcelino Sambé in Rhapsody on 19th and 22nd, which has also been changed on the website. Hoping Sambé is alright. 

Sambé is fine.  He announced last week that he wouldn't be doing his Rhapsody shows.

50 minutes ago, Geoff said:

 Might there be a ballet name missing here @Emeralds or have I misunderstood?

I think Emeralds is referring to Les Rendezvous 

26 minutes ago, aliceinwoolfland said:

A timely and interesting story....Pappano is a legend, but almost £1m in a year?! https://slippedisc.com/2024/06/pappano-leaves-covent-garden-with-a-final-30-pay-rise/

In typical Normal Lebrecht style, this is completely disingenuous.

Pappano's salary rose from £118,997 to £125,042 (a 5% rise and the lowest amongst the staff members referred to in Lebrecht's post).  AP's (contractual) fees for conducting rose from £446,250 to £690,197, purely on account of his conducting more performances in that reference year (the accounts confirm his base conducting fee did not rise).

ROHCGF annual report 22 23.pdf

1 hour ago, Lindsay said:

"What a disgusting, pompous, rude and condescending post."

Not in the slightest.  In the grand scheme of things to comment on from the performance seen, I'd put the quality of the music very, very low down the list.  And, on the basis of the lack of comment on it, it would appear that other think along the same lines.

Anyway, thank you for making my decision for me.   Having help to set up this forum many years ago, I'm leaving it because of people like you.

7 minutes ago, theorist said:

I'm surprised there hasn't been more comment on the poor sound quality of the recorded music in the Linbury.

I'd say that most of us have got better things to think about.

These tickets have been returned to the box office.

1 hour ago, Bruce Wall said:

 

The reverse I think is also true.  For example, they do some Balanchine works which are simply too large (as rendered by the stagings that are employed) for the intimate ROH - sorry RBO - space. 

 

Funny you say that, as the stage of the David H. Koch Theater is only marginally larger than that of the ROH (yes, ROH).

I have two spare tickets for Sarasota Ballet at the ROH Linbury Theatre on Sunday 9 June (2pm start) - stalls A11 & A12, tickets are £35 each.  Please PM if interested.

I have two spare tickets for Sarasota Ballet at the ROH Linbury Theatre on Friday 7 June - circle A23 & A24, tickets are £45 each.  Please PM if interested.

I have two spare tickets for Sarasota Ballet at the ROH Linbury Theatre on Thursday 6 June - stalls A11 & A12, tickets are £35 each.  Please PM if interested.

3 hours ago, Geoff said:

I noted the very Royal Opera misuse of English when they eventually got around to noticing something was wrong (around ten minutes in, after everyone had left frantic messages in the “chat” box - no doubt the person who monitors the output was having a break). Up popped an official message to say that they were working “on getting the sound back”, although there had never been any sound in the first place.
 

Maybe basic grammar is too much to ask these days but it did seem remarkable that there was no one responsible for checking the livestream. However I have observed the filming for Insights in the past and the people involved look nothing like the tv crews I am familiar with (very young, solemn, self-important yet anxious and with a sense of having been recruited on a friends’ basis). More a local college’s audio-visual department than tv professionals who, as ROH likes to boast, are “broadcasting around the world”. Perhaps this embarrassing and very public failure will send a signal to whichever managers are responsible. 

What a disgusting, pompous, rude and condescending post.

timings for Sarasota Linbury programmes

The "bell" is the notifications.

TKTS is no use for Wicked, I can’t remember the last time I saw discounted tickets for the show there.

Front row tickets go on sale on Wednesday at 10am for the shows the following week. Tickets are £29.50 and the central seats are excellent. Seats towards the ends of the row have quite a restricted view due to the staging.

Day tickets are also available at 10am on the day through TodayTix, again £29.50. I’ve had  some very good tickets for Wicked through this.

More details here

16 minutes ago, oncnp said:

Which I referenced up thread.

 

Mods - are all IG links to public accounts prohibited? 

Links are not prohibited, but posting the actual photograph is (unless the permission of the copyright holder has been obtained).

20 minutes ago, FionaM said:

Maybe this rule should be relaxed for photos posted on instagram stories … which are public but only stay visible for 24 hours (unless saved in a story highlight which many don’t bother to do)

 

I don’t know if that was the infringement you refer to, but I see a grey area here. 

There is no grey area here.  The fact that a photograph is visible to the public, no matter for how long, does not in itself give anyone rights to use that photograph.  In fact, you might say the exact opposite - if someone has posted a photograph that stops being visible after 24 hours, they don't want others to place it somewhere on the internet where it continues to be visible.

13 minutes ago, Mary said:

But isn't the point not what informed and discerning balletomanes think, but what the paying public as a whole might think, at a time when RBO need more than ever to get people to pay full price for seats- and well-known names would surely be one obvious strategy to deploy?

 

If I ask my colleagues to name a famous ballerina, the usual answers (bar the one or two quite cultured ones) would be Margot Fonteyn and Darcey Bussell.

18 hours ago, Fonty said:

I believe someone (I cannot remember who) did a post that said if they sold 60% (?) of the tickets at full price, and the remainder were heavily discounted, then the ROH would actually make more money than having less expensive ticket prices to start with.  I cannot remember the exact details, so my figures may be way out.  

Here's my original post on that point.

It is not correct to suggest that, now there's a discount, a sell out would be a justification for lowering prices day one.  If fact, its a justification to keep the prices high day one (if there is subsequently a sell-out using a discount), particularly when you look at the usual ticket sales info for the RBO (it is top-price and lowest price tickets that sell first - I've attached a picture of the booking plan that shows this).  As an RBO production has almost entirely fixed costs (i.e. that don't vary on the basis of the number of seats sold), they are looking to bring in as much cash as possible and, therefore, they are looking to sell as many higher price seats as soon as possible (lowering prices has a disproportionate effect on the "profitability" of a show, but cash in is still king so you want to get as much of it as possible, as quickly as possible).  Whilst it's nice to sell everything, the lower priced tickets are less of a concern in the overall picture.

If a show sells out with a discount, there will always be more money made by having higher prices to start with, unless not a single ticket is sold at the opening price (it's the same in a clothes shop, when they have a sale).

Say there's an auditorium with 100 seats, all priced at £100.  Two weeks before a show, 50% of those tickets have been sold - that's income of £5,000.  Discount the remaining seats by 40% and they all sell, that's another £3,000 - £8,000 in total.

If the seats had been priced at £60 to start with, the income would be £6,000 for a sell-out.  So, having the higher prices to start with has, in this example, resulted in a 33% increase in income. 

1 hour ago, Rachelm said:

I thought Anna Rose O’Sullivan would be cast as Alice again. I wonder if her current injury is significant then? 

O’Sullivan is currently rehearsing Rhapsody.

Probably a reason why GT C7 is usually a house seat for ballet performances!

1 minute ago, Lindsay said:

ps. I have a very good understanding of music licensing thank you, and was not saying that the music from WT should have been used.  Rather that a very cliched on-hold-to-a-call-centre piece of Vivaldi was not an inspired choice.

 

 

Thank you for your explanation, which is significantly more nuanced (and useful) than your original post.

3 minutes ago, Lindsay said:

Because Vivaldi is literally the only possible permitted soundtrack? 

No, but I doubt they could use any Joby Talbot or much that is similar.

1 minute ago, Lindsay said:

I think that must be true.  Even the utterly random choice of music on their insta videos (Vivaldi to promote Winters' Tale??) smacks of someone going "that sounds vaguely classical and I heard it in an advert somewhere, it'll do!" 

Or an understanding of how Instragram works when it comes to the rights to use pieces of music on posts!

1 hour ago, Geoff said:

Speaking personally as a long term (sixty years) ROH attendee, opera as well as ballet, acoustics are a priority for me and that auditorium can be problematic. Unlike you I find the stalls acoustic unsatisfactory and would urge you to try higher up. 
 

More or less irrespective where one sits away from the stalls, further forward will be better than further back. For example, row A of the Balcony, despite a punishing overhang, has surprisingly good sound.
 

The very best acoustics are in the amphitheatre and the slips, although for some productions you may not like the sight lines from many seats up there. 

+1 for row A of the balcony

1 hour ago, JennyTaylor said:

xylophones which were played with traditional mallets, but also with string bows.

The one that is sometimes played with a bow is called a vibraphone (it's the one on the right in Richard's picture, with the golden coloured bars).  It has hollow tubes under the metal bars that spin (it's plugged in...) which means it produces a sound with vibrato (hence the name!) rather than the more solid sound that one usually associates with struck percussion instruments.