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The Royal Ballet: Mayerling, Autumn 2018


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Just back from showing in Berlin. Delphi Palast am Zoo - fab old cinema from 30’s which somehow survived bombing. I’m hooked on ballet in cinema. Sekt, snacks, take in, people eat silently, relax, armchair seating, more (reasonably priced) Sekt in intervals, audience super quiet, spontaneous applause at end. Happy people! Alll cast good, my faves were Magri as Mitzi Caspar and Hay as Bratfisch- they surprised me by their subtle excellence!

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8 hours ago, Mummykool said:

It's not so much the tardiness of Luke Jennings review of Monday's performance as the inaccuracies within it. According to his review, the opening of Act 1 portrays Rudolph's engagement to Sophie. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Rudolph had just married Princess Stephanie, not got engaged to his grandmother!

A correction has been added to the original review: This article was amended on Monday 15 October to correct the name of Sophie’s sister in Mayerling, and the occasion of the ball.

That hardly clarifies things : Sophie's sister??

 

For the record, the Empress, Rudolf's grandmother, died in 1872, 9 years before his wedding.  Macmillan's error can be excused on the grounds of artistic licence.  What's Luke Jennings' excuse?

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A nearly full house in Cambridge Arts Picturehouse for the streaming.  It served as a reminder of the very considerable physical task faced by anyone dancing Rudolf, and Steven McCrae did exceedingly well.  Sarah Lamb is equally to be commended, but I thought there was something just a bit special in Laura Morera's Larisch, augmented by some of the close-ups, I'd say.  Kristen McNally, despite a valiant effort, seemed just too young for the Empress - perhaps I've become too used to her cheery, cheeky self when presenting World Ballet Day and the like.  Or perhaps it's simply that she's not Mme Yanowsky.  But a good show overall.

 

And I think we saw BBB on a couple of occasions passing through the Floral Hall (if that's what it's still called).

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Agree Sarah and I've been pondering about the difference between last night and the first night.

 

In the Hirano/Osipva performance I did not feel a sense of  the relationship between them- exceedingly good as Hirano is- there was just somehow a gap there ( I can understand reasons for that  of course with the cast change) and Osipova's torpedo approach just seemed to explode any of the more delicate aspects of the dancing between them. Whereas, McRae and Lamb seemed to be able to convey a relationship with some depth - damaged and violent at times but also erotic, deeply felt and sometimes actually tender. I felt that their established partnership, knowing each other so well, worked well here and you could feel it even in a cinema. That gave the whole ballet a heart which made sense of it all. I did also feel McRae acted throughout with much more depth than 2 years ago, and showed a character developing and becoming twisted by his surroundings, which was most moving.

 

The performance kept me awake last night which is why I am gibbering!

 

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I found Mayara Magri an unusually subtle and interesting Mitzi Caspar. But an excellent performance all round, with Steven McRae much more rounded and nuanced than I had expected.

 

And as usual I loved the interviews etc. Great to see Laura Connor again. And I thought it was really funny when they said about the pdds 'don't try this at home'!! (I wasn't intending to...).

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I too saw it at the cinema last night and really enjoyed it. I thought Steven and Sarah outstanding and also Laura Morera as Larisch and Mayara Magri as Mitzi Caspar. Possibly my favourite character was James Hay as Bratfisch. I thought he gave a splendid and nuanced performance; hugely memorable. I found myself wishing he had more to do even though it is still a great role.

it was interesting to listen to Laura Cononor's comments about the creation of Mitzi and the revelation that quite a chunk of the ballet was actually cut not long before the first night. They must have realised that many people rely on public transport to get home and a late finish could create problems. Also it is quite a sprawling ballet and I sometimes think it might still do with a bit of pruning; possibly in the tavern or fireworks scene. Also I've never really understood the significance of the picnic scene which seems quite elaborate but always rather sticks out to me as being out of place and possibly dispensable. What is it supposed to achieve? Is it just meant to highlight Rudolf's mental disintegration? I've always felt audience members near me don't really know how to react to it when it has its rather abrupt ending. They seem to feel they should applaud as it's the end of a scene but there's no dancing to applaud so they just whisper and mutter between themselves.

Anyway, a wonderful performance by everyone and it's good to see the RB carrying on the splendid standard they set last season.

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Many thanks for all the cinema reviews and looking forward to the encore on Sunday - not doing a very good job as parish council clerk as I've managed to schedule meetings which clash with both Mayerling and Nutcracker relays.

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A very satisfying evening at the cinema last night, with some excellent performances on show in a coherent, though not glitch-free, re-telling of the story.


I have to start with the wonderful Sarah Lamb as Mary. I’ve mentioned before how impressed I’ve been with the unique (to me) way she portrays Larisch - as someone inhabiting the space between the stage and the audience; as both character and story-teller/author, both experiencing the narrative arc and responsible for creating it. I felt she brought a little of that to last night’s performance as Mary; it was as if she knew where the story was going and had come to terms with it – this feeling arose from a variety of sources, and also from one amazing moment. 


Right from her entrance, and in contrast to, say, Osipova, Lamb appeared less excited, less excitable, more in control. Osipova played Mary as a ‘wild child’ reacting to, and getting her ‘highs’ from, the novelties presented to her (from the spectacle of the wedding ball to the ultimate novel experience of death). In contrast, Lamb played Mary as more mature, relaxed, ‘knowing’. This came across in her more muted behaviour at the ball; in the way she just handed over the letter to Larisch without any obvious second thought; in the complete absence of any doubt or hesitation in the Act 2 PDD; in her reaction to agreeing to the suicide pact (McRae’s face madly contorted, Lamb’s face almost serene); and, in particular, in an amazing moment with the skull at the end of Act 2. 


I thought it happened when I saw her in the last run, but I couldn’t be sure. This time I was prepared, and she didn’t disappoint. When Lamb’s Mary goes across to the desk and picks up the skull, she holds it in front of her and moves back towards Rudolf. Unlike any other portrayal I’ve seen, she holds the skull still in line of sight between the two of them, him looking at the skull’s face, and her looking at the back of it; she moves the skull away, so in Rudolf’s view the skull’s face is replaced by hers. It’s as if she is saying ‘I am death’. Given how important a ‘domino’ the Mayerling Incident was in the chain-reaction of events leading to the calamity that engulfed the world 25 years later, I’m tempted to extend that to the quote used by Oppenheimer – ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ That’s probably a step (or three!) too far, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that Sarah Lamb has an incredible affinity for these narrative ballets and an aptitude for teasing out nuances from them; she is a very cerebral ballerina! And, just to bring it back down to a more basic level, her legs and the way she uses them are just incredible!


It’s such a complex ballet that there are bound to be some ‘adjustments’ that need to be made on-the-fly. One that caught my eye was at the beginning of the fortune-telling scene. Whoever has set out the props had forgotten to place the vase upright; Lamb took this in her stride wonderfully – she put the vase upright, then wiped the table with her dress where the mouth of it had been, as if mopping up the spilled water! Brilliant!


As far as other characters are concerned…


- James Hay put in a wonderful performance as Bratfisch. He was razor-sharp in his execution, and played the character beautifully. The look of desperation that accompanied those similarly desperate attempts to pull Rudolf back from the brink was poignantly realised. I don’t know if it was a trick of the camera angles, but I got the impression that Bratfisch was looking at Mary when Rudolf finally dismissed him – as if he had an inkling that her presence meant this was the end, and it was his last appeal to her.


- Anna Rose was an absolute gem as Louise. Her character radiated strongly into the auditorium throughout her assured performance, and the audience basked in its light – a star in the making! It was lovely to see her receive some flowers at the curtain calls.


- Stephanie failed to convince me in her solo in the bedroom at the end of Act 1, but this greatly improved once Rudolf was on stage, though some of the lifts were ragged beyond excusing them as attempts to look spontaneous.


- Morera did well, but unfortunately I can’t help but compare her reading of Larisch with Lamb’s. However, what came over particularly well in the cinema was the poignancy as the ‘old guard’ mistress anointed and passed on the mantle to the younger, more vibrant and effective blood.


Broadcast ‘annoyances’. A few key moments were missed:- the reason why Stephanie left the stage in the brothel scene; the turning over of the third card (death?) in the fortune-telling scene, though the subsequent ‘switch’ was; the first half of confrontation between Taafe and Rudolf was replaced with Bay offering the cigar to Franz Joseph. On a more general level, there is still the tendency to focus on the torso/head at the expense of the legs/feet. An example that springs to mind is the hunting scene where the Hungarian officers and Rudolf encircle Franz Joseph. This approach is almost a relic from DVD days, when video resolution was low and close-ups a necessity; in today’s HD/Blu-Ray world, this is less excusable. And can we please have a 'flash' to accompany the revolver shots behind the bedroom screens (the 'pop' of the gun is totally unconvincing on its own)?


That leaves me with the tricky bit – McRae. He has improved greatly from the last run – replacing the ‘pantomime villain’ snarling-face (is there an emoji for that?) with something more nuanced and effective. His movement across the stage (particularly his solos in the brothel and fireworks scenes) was breath-taking – almost as if the video feed to the cinema had lagged and was on fast forward to catch up! I can only imagine how good it must have looked at the ROH. In contrast, some of his lifts looked like he was at, and almost beyond, his limit; his partners were not always elevated enough to avoid slippage, and subsequent moves looked ‘strained’ for the wrong reasons (the Act 1 and 3 PDDs spring to mind). The Matthew Ball debut also had this problem to some extent, but there were no such worries with Hirano – he was as strong and stable as a Prime Minister ox.


I waited to be moved by the final PDD, and was confused when I wasn’t. Having had time to reflect, I think it was the combination of Mary’s almost passive acceptance of her fate, and of a Rudolf for whom I had little sympathy. Of course, Rudolf has an uphill battle to gain anyone’s sympathy, for he can be seen as a coward who cannot just ‘top’ himself, but needs the endorsement of a partner in crime.


To have sympathy for Rudolf, I need to be able to feel he is a victim not a perpetrator, to feel that there were other paths he could have taken, or paths he tried to take. I didn’t see much on stage to convince me otherwise; yes, being spurned by his mother was heart-breaking; yes, his expression of angst in his solo in the final PDD was strong and clear; yes, he was the victim of the hypocrisy of the court (the affairs by all and sundry, the arranged marriage as ‘formalised prostitution’), but others managed to deal with it. Now, of course, we are not party to all of the events that made him who he was at the beginning of the ballet (cold, ruthless, boorish, vulgar), and the box labelled ‘nature vs nurture, responsibility, agency, determinism, etc’ is a Pandora’s Box we can point to but don’t really want to open, but that journey seemed just about complete by then. Overall, I was left with the impression he was a bit too one-dimensional, and that dimension was psychopath/sociopath; they don’t care about ordinary people, and the gulf is too big for ordinary people to care too much about them.


This is in contrast to Hirano, who appeared to be someone fighting a losing battle to contain his urges. But the volcano was building up its pressure relentlessly, with minor eruptions leading eventually to him – literally – blowing his top. With Ball, I got the impression that here was someone who had lost control of the vehicle he was driving, and was looking for an escape route to minimise the damage that would inevitably be wreaked (maybe like the Trolley Problem in ethics?); this was particularly evident in the ‘clarity’ with which he decided to fetch the gun and ask Mary to die with him. At least they seemed to be offering some resistance to their urges, so ended up gaining some of my sympathy.
 

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I hadn’t had enough sleep (my ongoing sleep apnoea problem), so almost decided to give the Curzon screening a miss. However as I had never seen Mayerling, and had a ticket I bought some months ago, I decided to brave it.

I’m so glad I did. It was a screening of the RB in Manon a few years ago which, along with a couple of other things (the first World Ballet Day was one), made me take a much greater interest in ballet than previously. That Manon was superb, but in my opinion, Mayerling surpassed it. It was one of the most compelling performances, in any of the performing arts, that I have ever seen.

I am still far too much of a beginner in knowledge and appreciation of ballet to give an informative review, as so many on this excellent forum can. However I would just like to record the impressions of a member of the “general public”, as a tribute and thanks to the RB for their Mayerling.

The music. I am not particularly fond of Liszt’s music. I’ve the impression that it tends to be showy and superficial. But this music wasn’t, and fitted the ballet perfectly. Its lush, melodramatic hyper-Romanticism including screeching dissonances, pointing up so well the dark and disturbing storyline. The orchestra played a large part in the success of the production.

I was impressed by all the leading dancers, and it may be wrong to single any out. However it is impossible not to talk about Steven McRae. I gather from the posts of the more knowledgeable, that he was not impressive when he first took this role, but he must have improved because I thought he was sensational. His acting skills are now very good. The part of Rudolf almost invites over-acting, but he only very occasionally approached this point.

And to add to the acting, what tremendous physical condition dancers must be to dance this part. No wonder that a number of pas-de-deux  were cut from the original, as it would have been too much for the man dancing Rudolf.  Even with the omissions, I wonder how many “tons of ballerina” Steven McRae must have lifted last night! And then to have to perform one of the most important PDDs at the end. All while having to disguise the effort required. This is yet another reason why it is so annoying when you get remarks from those involved in sports such as football and rugby, which imply that ballet is an activity for weaklings.

It was good to see Kristen McNally other than as a presenter on World Ballet Day. Yes, perhaps she was a bit young to portray the Empress Elizabeth, but it was nice to see her get a real meaty part.

The corps again were magnificent. I think the quality of a ballet company depends at least as much on the corps as on the principals. When we were given sequences where the corps was in full view, I was again impressed with the acting ability of all on stage. It must be particularly difficult to do this when you are not the centre of attention, but required to be part of convincing background.

The fact that several of the female dancers in the corps, in Act II, wore high heels, rather than pointe shoes, made me wonder how ballet might have developed if en pointe dancing hadn’t been invented.

As for the PDDs, has there ever been choreographed a more violent PDD than the ending of Act I? Or a more erotic one than the ending of Act II?

My sleep apnoea means that I have a tendency to fall asleep if some performance, in arts or sports, is not compellingly interesting. I thought of asking the people in the neighbouring seats to give me a dig in the ribs if I fell asleep and started snoring. However as they were both women, I decided that might be misconstrued. As it was, I only briefly, during the very long Act II, felt my attention wavering, and it was soon cured by yet another compelling piece of action.

I gather from comments I have read in this forum, that Kenneth McMillan is not universally admired by ballet-lovers. My impression from both Mayerling and Manon, is that he was a true genius.

I thought the quality of the presentation has improved. There was, I think, rather less of the “cutting off” of the feet of the dancers in the filming. Also I felt that Ore Oduba presented very well. Darcey Bussell has improved – though she did scramble one of her sentences, perhaps indicating that she is still a little nervous.

The transmission on several occasions began to go wrong, but happily the worst was a second or two where the picture and sound were both lost.

I don’t blame those who haven’t bothered to read my ramblings in this post. I just had to put down my experience of a remarkable evening.

Thank you, The Royal Ballet, for such a memorable experience.

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Dear Mayerling fans, I have just found a book on Amazon published in the last year about Mayerling entitled “Twilight of Empire” by Greg Hill. He’s a good historian and the reviews are very good so there’s another one for my Mayerling collection! I haven’t posted about the ballet because everyone else has said it so well but I will say that last night we were transported to the stifling court of Austria-Hungary and were on the edge of our seats the whole time. It is such a terrific ensemble piece but Sarah Lamb, Steven McRae, James Hay, Mayara Magri and Anna Rose Sullivan were stellar and the whole company on fire. Bravo!

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Nice to see you back, FrankH, and thanks for the detailed feedback on the cinema broadcast, which I missed.

 

I don't know whether you're aware, although it's been discussed before in relation to the ROH screenings, but Darcey Bussell suffers from dyslexia, so does sometimes have problems with the autocue.

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challenging sThe music to which the ballet is set is overblown and overwrought but that is one of the reasons why it was chosen the other is that it is the work  of a contemporary composer whose compositions can easily be seen as the background music of Franz Joseph's entire reign.  I accept that both the scene of the "pleasant musical evening" and the hunting scene can seem unnecessarily protracted if they are not played for their full effect. I think that we would notice their loss if they were to be completely cut or simply edited down to what the editor, who would almost certainly be Lady M, might deem as the essential elements  which further the action of the narrative. Her revisions of Manon make it clear to me that she is not the person to do it as she lacks any real feeling for the overall dramatic effect of the cuts, interpolations, re-orchestration and general slowing down of what was, in the form devised by her late husband, an effective high octane rush from murder to Manon's death in the Louisiana swamps.

 

Whatever faults Mayerling may have, and I have an inconstant, if not an ambiguous relationship with it, the fault does not lie with Gillian Freeman's' libretto which is beautifully poised as far as trajectory and dramatic effects are concerned. However anxious we may be to cut to the chase the reality is that the dancer portraying Rudolf needs the occasional breather if he is to make it to the last scene of the final act and the audience needs contrasts and the occasional dampening down of its emotional responses if it is to experience the full effect of the impact which its choreographer intend the work to have. MacMillan's Mayerling is a sprawling work and not every scene is equally effective however well cast it may be but I am far from convinced that it can be improved upon without making the role of Rudolf  impossible to dance which would be the most obvious effect of tightening it up and making it almost impossible for an audience to endure because there would be no respite from its high octane emotional effects.

 

The whole point about the pleasant musical evening, which I have always taken to be Franz Joseph's birthday or his name day, it does not matter which it proves to be, is that it reveals the true state of the imperial family's interfamily relationships. We see that the Emperor is more interested in his mistress than his wife; his wife acknowledges this relationship by the gift of the portrait which she gives her husband; she in turn is more interested in her lover than anyone else; Rudolf is indifferent to his wife and is more interested in Larisch's abilities as a procuress than anything else. It is a very complex set of relationships to portray but one which the choreographer and his dramaturge deftly sketch by the choice of participants who are present in the scene and their actions. It goes a long way to disprove Balanchine' s famous statement about the impossibility of portraying complex relationships although its primary function is to prepare the audience very effectively for the scene which follows it. The meeting between Rudolf and Mary which follows it seems more real and believable and is made more acceptable to the audience because the united family which the musical evening is intended to portray is clearly a sham for public consumption only.

 

I don't think that you can look at any scene in the ballet in complete isolation. You have to consider each scene in the context of what precedes it and what follows it. At the ballet's premiere the hunting scene was a stand out for me because it was so beautifully lit and it seems to me that as originally conceived it had a dramatic purpose. Remember MacMillan employed a  dramaturge to create the libretto for his ballet and she created a narrative which was not all in one key and while there is little room for fun and laughter in this tale of doomed love the audience needs a bit of a respite from dark rooms and all that debauchery, despair and death. In its extended form the scene  provided an opportunity to take the pressure off the audience and to give Rudolf himself a bit of a breather before the final scenes. Here was the opportunity to create an  atmosphere of seeming tranquillity showing the Hapsburgs relaxing and at play with Rudolf apparently under little pressure from anyone and engaging in game shooting.an appropriate Imperial pastime, which is brought to a juddering halt by an incident which may or may not be a botched assassination attempt. Everything is ambiguous and the audience should be  left wondering whether it really was an accident which it is being encouraged to ,misinterpret, in the way that those characters who have suspicions  about Rudolf's activities because of his political affiliations, view it,  or whether it really was an attempted assassination? Having eased the pressure on the audience the narrative now ratchets it up and the audience comes to appreciate that the increasing pressure on Rudolf leaves him little room for manoeuvre and makes his decision to kill himself in a suicide pact feel almost inevitable. In its original form the scene included a snowball fight which further lightened its atmosphere and gave the audience a vignette of the Hapsburgs at play rather than seeing them in stuffy rooms subject to court protocol or engaged in adulterous pursuits . The snowball fight was cut very early on which is a pity because it gave the apparently accidental death more dramatic impact than it has at present. At one point the entire scene was cut but that did not help the narrative. It was reinstated in a more truncated form not long after but now it seems to be there merely as a precursor to the  accidental death. And so the unending tale of MacMillan's sprawling masterpiece  continues. To cut or not to cut that is the question Personally I would leave the three cash cows as the choreographer left them and restore anything and everything that Lady M has chosen to cut or revise over the years. 

 

As for MacMillan being a towering genius it all depends on which ballets you look at. His output is far more variable than say Ashton's or Balanchine's although even the greatest choreographers have their off days. Let me put it diplomatically it is unfortunate that Lady M sees her late husband as essentially the creator of challenging dram ballets including all those challenging one acters such as Different Drummer and The Judas Tree rather than as a significant classical choreographer whose classically based works should be regularly revived, but that is how it is. It would assist MacMillan's posthumous reputation if she were to vow never to try to revive Isadora in any shape or form and she began to advocate  for regular revivals of works like The Four Seasons and biennial revivals of Song of the Earth so that the company could do it full justice, it is after all, his greatest work. But strangely that seems unlikely, possibly because they don't generate as much income as a his three acters do.

Edited by FLOSS
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1 hour ago, FLOSS said:

the overall dramatic effect of the cuts, interpolations, re-orchestration and general slowing down of what was, in the form devised by her late husband, an effective high octane rush from murder to Manon's death in the Louisiana swamps.

 

 

The murder of the Gaoler, I assume you mean, FLOSS?  I wasn't aware of cuts/interpolations beyond that point.  (If you'd like to expand on this, please use the last Manon thread.)

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3 hours ago, Nogoat said:

To have sympathy for Rudolf, I need to be able to feel he is a victim not a perpetrator, to feel that there were other paths he could have taken, or paths he tried to take. I didn’t see much on stage to convince me otherwise; yes, being spurned by his mother was heart-breaking; yes, his expression of angst in his solo in the final PDD was strong and clear; yes, he was the victim of the hypocrisy of the court (the affairs by all and sundry, the arranged marriage as ‘formalised prostitution’), but others managed to deal with it. Now, of course, we are not party to all of the events that made him who he was at the beginning of the ballet (cold, ruthless, boorish, vulgar), and the box labelled ‘nature vs nurture, responsibility, agency, determinism, etc’ is a Pandora’s Box we can point to but don’t really want to open, but that journey seemed just about complete by then. Overall, I was left with the impression he was a bit too one-dimensional, and that dimension was psychopath/sociopath; they don’t care about ordinary people, and the gulf is too big for ordinary people to care too much about them.


This is in contrast to Hirano, who appeared to be someone fighting a losing battle to contain his urges. But the volcano was building up its pressure relentlessly, with minor eruptions leading eventually to him – literally – blowing his top

 

That's exactly it and I have always felt the problem lies in the ballet,  not the dancers playing Rudolf-and very often I am more revolted than interested or engaged by his character and by the narrative...BUT

some of the dancers, nonetheless, DO manage to gain a little of my sympathy and engage my emotions. (the one above all for me was Jonathan Cope)

BUT I can only say I feel exactly the reverse about McRae and Hirano to your view Nogoat- Hirano/Osipova did not move me at all, whereas McRae did and I did feel his character changing throughout the Acts, rather than just at the end - as with Hirano. I did feel that as well as being boorish etc he was pitiable, suffering, and increasingly desperate.

 

I agree McRae looked almost at the end of his tether once or twice-:I have never seen him look like that before. Of course he is just back from serious injury and it must have been a killer. In a way- rather a terrible way- it seems almost to have added to the perfomance. I do hope he recovers really 100%.

 

I mean no disrespect to Hirano and admire them both enormously.

 

 

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I thought he looked utterly exhausted at the curtain call. I think he has really grown as an actor since “Frankenstein”. Having seen a member of Ballet Co - whom I like - say that they did not care for Steven in this role I was rather concerned but he really gave it everything last night. 

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5 hours ago, alison said:

Nice to see you back, FrankH, and thanks for the detailed feedback on the cinema broadcast, which I missed.

 

I don't know whether you're aware, although it's been discussed before in relation to the ROH screenings, but Darcey Bussell suffers from dyslexia, so does sometimes have problems with the autocue.

Thank you Alison.

 

I think I may have heard about Darcey Bussell's dyslexia, but my memory these days is not good.

Perhaps nervousness might affect the mental things she has to do to counteract her condition - but that's just my speculation.

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I'm a bit late commenting on the cinema broadcast but for the most part I really enjoyed it.  I really like Mayerling a lot but I've never seen it live, only on the DVD with Ed Watson who's just insanely good in it, so I was trying hard to not compare.  I'm actually going on Friday for my first live Mayerling so that's exciting!

 

So anyway, my thoughts on it:

 

I think it goes without saying everyone danced spectacularly well but for me, I didn't really like McRae's take on Rudolf.  I feel this ballet has such a huge emotional range to it, and it's a bit of a rollercoaster that by the end you also feel exhausted too because it's such a journey to go on with this character.  Well I didn't get that with McRae as I felt his interpretation was very focused on the anger and rage side of Rudolf's madness that I didn't feel like the character's desperate sadness or despair came across.  Of course, you can see from Rudolf's actions that he was desperate but for me it didn't come through in the acting.  It didn't stop me admiring his performance don't get me wrong, it was very impressive but I didn't get the emotional punch from it.  

 

I thought Sarah Lamb was incredible as Mary Vetsera.  I really believed she was the character, she somehow even looked like a teenager even on the big screen 😄 I really loved her interpretation of the role and her acting. I also thought Laura Morera was outstanding as Marie Larisch...I really enjoyed her performance.

 

James Hay as Bratfisch was my other favourite performance of the night.  He just danced the part beautifully, it looked perfect.  He really got the most out of this character and it was just a really interesting performance...I could have watched a spin off ballet, Bratfisch: The Aftermath or something detailing what happens next to poor Bratfisch 😀

 

Anyway, it's been interesting reading everyone's thoughts on the performances so far and I'll look forward to seeing Hirano's take on it.

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54 minutes ago, serenade said:

James Hay as Bratfisch was my other favourite performance of the night.  He just danced the part beautifully, it looked perfect.  He really got the most out of this character and it was just a really interesting performance...I could have watched a spin off ballet, Bratfisch: The Aftermath or something detailing what happens next to poor Bratfisch 😀

 

 

 

Well, the way the role was being cast when I last saw Mayerling a few years ago, I used to wonder if there was a lost Act 4 somewhere in which he was revealed as Rudolf's younger brother, stolen in infancy !

Edited by Jane S
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If you want a spin off ballet, it must surely be Larisch in Exile. Banished from the court she took up with an opera singer

who became persona non grata because of his relationship with her. They had a son. The relationship ended.In reply to an article in she placed in a newspaper she found herself in the USA married to an abusive husband. She died in Nazi Germany the year I was born. Her son died in 1977, the year before Mayerling was performed at The Royal Opera House. What a woman!

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