★★★★✰ Jann Parry reviews the RB Balanchine and Robbins bill featuring Apollo, Tchaikovsky pas de deux and Dances at a Gathering.
Tag - Federico Bonelli
Featuring Apollo, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and Dances at a Gathering. Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
★★★★★ Thank you, Royal Ballet, for giving so much pleasure in trying times.
★★★★✰ Kevin O'Hare, director of the Royal Ballet, came on stage to welcome the return of a paying audience for what turned out to be the opening and closing live performance of the season...
The entire Royal Ballet were back on stage and performing for a live audience last Friday in a gala style show which was/is also streamed. Jann Parry was mightily impressed with the dancing and repertoire (★★★★★) if not so much with the live audience experience in a Covid aware Opera House (★★★✰✰)
★★★✰✰ Wayne McGregor’s first full-length creation for the Royal Ballet, Woolf Works, inspired by Virginia Woolf, remains one of his best works to date.
★★★★✰ Osipova inhabits the role of Anna Anderson with gruelling sincerity. She appears deranged from the beginning with close-up camera angles revealing a depth of despair that is tremendously affecting.
★★★✰✰ In The Cellist, Cathy Marston has taken on a challenging subject for her first commission for the Royal Opera House stage: the real-life story of a much-loved musician Jacqueline Du Pré...
★★✰✰✰ Could Liam Scarlett's monstrous Frankenstein be fixed with more, better surgery? Evidently not, in this revival, three years after its creation.
Jann Parry talks to the recently promoted Mayara Magri at an important time - she is about to make her debut as Gamzatti in The Royal Ballet's production of La Bayadere - her first major and leading role in the company she joined 6 years ago...
★★★★✰ The partnership in Mayerling between Morera and Bonelli is a fine example of how experience can illumine the nuances of a dramatic ballet.
★★★★✰ McGregor’s company dancers (in Bach Forms) brought a surging energy, buoying up jewel-like moments from the Royal Ballet stars...
★★★★✰ The ostensible link between the three works in this mixed bill is that they are by the Royal Ballet's resident choreographers, past and present: Frederick Ashton. Kenneth MacMillan and Wayne McGregor. But none is typical of the choreographers' work...
★★★★✰ It's a myth that Kenneth MacMillan's Manon was ever regarded as a failure. Critics may initially have had reservations but audiences have enjoyed it from its first season in 1974 throughout its many revivals...
Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou...
★★★✰✰ Leonard Bernstein wrote (in 1949): "I have a deep suspicion that every work I write, for whatever medium, is really theatre music in some way.' Many choreographers have taken up the challenge, though his quasi-metaphysical musings have usually eluded them: dance is more corporeal than music.
The Bernstein Centenary bill includes new works by Christopher Wheeldon (Corybantic Games) and Wayne McGregor (Yugen). Liam Scarlett's The Age of Anxiety completes the bill. Gallery by Dave Morgan...
★★★✰✰ This year's Russian Ballet gala was ostensibly in honour of the 200th anniversary of Marius Petipa's birth. Any choreography attributed to him was mostly a long way 'after Petipa', but it's always fun to see excellent Russian dancers deliver pas de deux from Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Le Corsaire.
★★★★★ Peter Wright's 1985 production for the Royal Ballet has had many interpreters, all subtly or extravagantly different. Nunez is amongst the finest, a perfectionist who seems realistically earthy as a country girl who loves dancing and ethereal as her defiant spirit.
Head and shoulders above other new work this year was Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern for the Royal Ballet...