★★★✰✰ It’s a bit of a bashed-together stream, with a shiny new, COVID-19 era recording of Emeralds, made in January of this year, teamed up with a Rubies from 2016, and Diamonds from 2017...
Author - Eric Taub
Eric Taub, based in New York, is just trying to write about dance and other things, intelligibly.
★★★★✰ It’s comforting to know that at even my advanced age I can still be confounded even by hoary old Swan Lake.
★★★★✰ As a special one-off, Michael Trusnovec, now a guest artist, danced the solo from George Balanchine’s spiky and ascetic Episodes which he made for Paul Taylor in 1959.
★★★★✰ Starwise, Bejart's Wayfarer bumps this program from two stars to four.
★★✰✰✰ I hadn’t seen much of the well-regarded Cuthbertson, so I was looking forward to this chance to get to know her (she appeared in four of five pieces), as well as the not-always-dubious introduction to new works by new choreographers...
★★★✰✰ One of the earliest things I appreciated about Balanchine is that he made me feel okay about liking Tschaikovsky (as NYCB likes to spell it)...
★★★★✰ On the second night the program was offered, Mearns was stunning, but the remaining three pieces, by three different companies were, to varying degrees, engaging, although hers was a tough act to follow.
★★★✰✰ Ultimately, the best thing about Alonso’s Giselle is that it’s danced by Cubans, and that’s good enough for me.
Quibbling and Côté aside, these were both terrific performances, bursting with energy ...I wouldn’t mind seeing the Canadians become regular visitors to Saratoga
American Ballet Theatre have a new production of Le Corsaire. Eric Taub sees the headline casting of Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev - but was he moved and wowed? Not really...
Along the way, the show strings together some memorably ravishing songs and knock-out dance numbers while having fun...
...Bart's a gifted and discerning artist, with a deep understanding of the Opera's heritage and style. Rather than trying to "recreate" the long-forgotten original choreography by Arthur St. Leon, Bart's made a new work that feels old, as if it had long been a warhorse of the Opera's repertory, subject to over a century of vagaries in taste and technique, yet emerging today all the richer for the...
After the dreary bombast of Alexei Ratmansky's recent Firebird for American Ballet Theatre, the Balanchine/Robbins version, with its blessedly shorter score (Stravinsky's Firebird Suite), heavenly Chagall designs and the great Ashley Bouder in one of her first great roles, was a welcome palliative.
Ten or so years ago, I was watching ABT soloist Gennadi Saveliev dance Lankendem, the red-pajamad slave-dealer in ABT's nicely condensed Le Corsaire, when he uncorked a step that made my jaw drop.
...so I will just conclude with noting that another depressing thing about the evening's kitsch-ridden choreography was that it didn't quite obscure the occasional glimmers of brilliance that reminded us that these men are, indeed, among the world's best, despite this tawdry presentation.