ROH
judith.flanders
A new Liam Scarlett ballet has become an event, even as, in this case, Scarlett’s home company, the Royal Ballet, is recreating a work he choreographed last January for Miami City Ballet – the young choreographer’s first international commission.In Viscera, Scarlett continues to pay homage to his choreographic masters – previously he has tipped his hat to Ashton and MacMillan. For Miami, directed for so many decades by George Balanchine’s great muse Edward Villella, he not unnaturally looks to the American genius. His choice of music – a piano concerto by Lowell Liebermann – sets the tone, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tonight the Royal Ballet's live Swan Lake opens the most extensive season yet of live screenings to cinemas worldwide of the Royal Opera House's productions. Zenaida Yanowsky and Nehemiah Kish, in the leading roles of the Swan Queen and her evil counterpart Odile, and Prince Siegfried, will be beamed across oceans to cinema-goers in St Julians, Malta, to the Montevideo Moviecenter in Uruguay, as well as to the Apollo, Burnley and the Enfield Cineworld.The Opera House website lets you enter your country and postcode and instantly find cinemas near you that will simultaneously be screening the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The virtuoso Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova will guest with the Royal Ballet this autumn with Carlos Acosta in the opening run of Swan Lake. Osipova, whose partnership with the phenomenal Ivan Vasiliev has become the most talked-about in world ballet, will dance the double role of Odette/Odile (the White Swan and Black Swan) on 10, 13 and 25 October with the RB's Cuban star Carlos Acosta, in place of Tamara Rojo, the ballerina who becomes English National Ballet's artistic director from September.Osipova and Vasiliev caused a sensation off-stage last winter when they quit the Bolshoi to Read more ...
David Nice
Pardon the anomaly of a lightly browned-up Latvian Moor married to a German-Greek beauty. This, after all, is not Shakespeare’s play but Verdi’s opera, for which all too few are born to sing heroic tenor Otello and lyric-dramatic soprano Desdemona. Great singing from Aleksandrs Antonenko and great everything from Anja Harteros vindicate Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano’s decision to give Elijah Moshinsky’s 25-year-old production a proud place in the World Shakespeare Festival and to mix finesse with power in realizing every facet of this astonishing score.The framework still holds Read more ...
graham.rickson
Massenet: Werther Rolando Villazón, Sophie Koch, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House/Antonio Pappano (DG)Massenet’s Goethe adaptation needs a lot of love to make it convince as a drama. Fortunately this live Covent Garden performance, taped last May, has Antonio Pappano at the helm. There’s no one better at glossing over the piece’s longueurs. You need someone who can make you forget Werther’s clunkiness, its occasional risible moments. I can never maintain a straight face in Act 3 when Charlotte learns of Werther’s fateful message: “ I am leaving on a lengthy journey. Will you lend me Read more ...
judith.flanders
Ballo della Regina is a strange piece, for many reasons. A piece of minor Balanchine, it was created late in life for a dancer he clearly admired but who was not core to his vision. Strangest of all, he used music by Verdi, a composer whose music he had only choreographed to in his very early days as a journeyman opera-house ballet-master, when he did not get to choose.So what does the piece tell us? Very little, really. Staged by Merrill Ashley, its original lead, it is efficient, neat, well-rehearsed. And I can see no real purpose to it. The curtain rises on a heart-liftingly familiar Read more ...
Ismene Brown
All year we've had to wait for a world premiere, and two come along at once. Last night was built to make some noise about the three most impressive young names in Royal Ballet choreography, and that will be where the PR story ends, but not where the flat disappointment ends. For while Christopher Wheeldon is shown at his magnificent best in an early piece, both Liam Scarlett and Wayne McGregor's new creations are nowhere near the best that either has shown.They're opposites, but alike in why they fail. Scarlett’s Sweet Violets is an impenetrable jangle of narrative in the old style; McGregor Read more ...
judith.flanders
"I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works," accuses the Mad Hatter. "It was the best butter," replies the March Hare apologetically, in Lewis Carroll’s original tale. Butter might or might not suit the works onstage in the Royal Ballet’s everything-including-the-kitchen-sink version of Alice in Wonderland. We’ll never know, since Christopher Wheeldon has not used any butter at all, allowing his audience the merest scrape of choreographic margarine. If you like video tricks, dazzling projections, special effects and Uncle-Tom-Cobbleigh-and-all, then this Alice in Wonderland is for you. If, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
World premieres, new faces, lower ticket prices (and the first recycled opera production). The Royal Opera House announced a bullish attitude today as it enters the austerity post-Olympics period for next season with six ballet premieres and six new opera productions. Ballet headlines are that the leading Russian choreographer of the era, Alexei Ratmansky, will create a work for the Royal Ballet - as will Christopher Wheeldon. Radical abstractionist Wayne McGregor will create his first narrative ballet, and the rising young Liam Scarlett will create his first full-length ballet.Both Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Boy George will be in a live line-up of singer-performers for the latest Royal Ballet premiere by Wayne McGregor. Mark Ronson's cycle of nine love songs, orchestrated by Rufus Wainwright, will be performed by the former Culture Club New-Romantic (he's now 50), alongside Alison Mosshart of The Kills, Jonny Pierce of The Drums, Hero Fisher, Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow, and rappers Wale and his protégé Black Cobain during the six-performance run next month.The singers will apparently be onstage with the dancers in the work, called Carbon Life, and designs by Gareth Pugh, whose flamboyant club Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Better late than never. It took till Act 3 for a new Juliet to fledge her wings and shed the nervous caution, but Melissa Hamilton, debuting yesterday afternoon in probably the Royal Ballet’s most coveted ballerina role, suddenly did what we all knew she could, and after a subdued first act seized the drama and the story. And, in Romeo’s phrase, light broke - the sun in the east. A fair new Juliet.Hamilton, a blonde beauty of 23, is the most interesting performer of young-generation girls at Covent Garden, an Irish child and late starter rejected by the Royal Ballet School, who refused to be Read more ...
geoff brown
Why has the Royal Opera not staged Dvořák’s Rusalka before now? I know there have been plausible distractions: the lock grip of Italian repertoire, fear of singing Czech, fixation with Dvořák as an instrumental composer, two world wars, a shortage of good water nymphs. But Sadler’s Wells gave the British premiere of this musically sumptuous "lyric fairytale" (its official description) as long ago as 1959. Since then the Little Mermaid-ish drama of the water nymph longing for human love has visited English National Opera, Glyndebourne, Opera North, Grange Park, Wexford; I could Read more ...