Hallé / Sir Mark Elder - selections from Sleeping Beauty (30th November and 1st / 4th December)

[ChrisG]

If any of you are in or around Manchester this week and want a Sleeping Beauty fix, then Mark Elder will be conducting the Hallé in his own personal selection of music from the ballet (sadly sans dancers!) at the Bridgewater Hall this afternoon (Wednesday 30th) at 2.15pm, and also on Thursday 1st December at 7.30 and Sunday 4th December at 4pm. The programme also includes Samuel Barber’s Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, an extract from a ballet score that he apparently wrote for Martha Graham. I’m going this afternoon and I’m really interested to see what Sir Mark selects from Sleeping Beauty and whether his favourite bits are the same as mine!

[Emeralds]

Hope he picks the Entr’acte music with the gorgeous violin solo as it’s not performed very often in most productions and is really exquisite. Audiences who don’t know it  usually look quizzical when it’s first played in a production of Sleeping Beauty but are soon entranced and there’s always enthusiastic applause at the end. Nureyev used it in a solo for Florimund, Ashton used it for a pas de deux for Aurora and Florimund after he wakes her, and Neumeier used the music to portray Pavlova and Cecchetti in a ballet class in his ballet about Nijinsky, to name just a few choreographers inspired by it. It would sound wonderful in a concert hall. The programme sounds refreshing and interesting, as Mark Elder’s programming often is. Wish I could go, but unfortunately my schedule is packed already for those dates. Have a great time, ChrisG!

[ChrisG]

The concert is being recorded by the BBC for broadcast on December 15th, and obviously BBC Sounds thereafter