tue 05/11/2024

Nutcracker

The Nutcracker, English National Ballet, London Coliseum

The lighting chief holds the success of a magical fairy-tale staging in his hands. Whatever the designer has done, however fantastical and virtuosic his visions, the lighting chief can ruin it. So it is with English National Ballet’s new Nutcracker...

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Design Secrets of Cinderella and The Nutcracker

The designer of a fairytale ballet is far, far more important than the choreographer. It's those visions that lodge themselves in children's heads, in adults' memories, embedded with the music. And at no time more potently than Christmas when it's...

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Classical CDs Round-Up 14

This month’s selection includes two seasonal releases – one a selection of Tudor choral music and the other a popular Christmas ballet. There’s yet more ballet in a new disc from Russian forces, and late-Romantic orchestral music is represented by...

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The Nutcracker, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham Hippodrome

Peter Wright’s superlative production of The Nutcracker has returned to Birmingham Royal Ballet's repertory for Christmas, a production he created for the company in 1990 and to my mind superior to any other presented in the UK today. Magic, the...

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How To Design The Nutcracker

Christmas ballet would be unthinkable without The Nutcracker. But what kind of Christmas should it be? This year the UK fields an astonishing array of visions, from Biedermeier formality at the Royal Ballet, to Fanny and Alexander romanticism at...

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Design gallery: Three Nutcrackers

Is the look to be Beckmann, Bergman or Nicky Haslam? To accompany the interviews with Nutcracker designers elsewhere, here are three very different design portfolios tackling the eternal magic of this favourite ballet with unexpected reference...

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In the realm of the Nutcracker king

At this time of year people who love ballet divide into two tribes: those who are too sophisticated for The Nutcracker and those who will never been too sophisticated for The Nutcracker. The former will say that The Nutcracker is a children’s ballet...

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