★★★✰✰ 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...
Tag - Misa Kuranaga
★★★★✰ San Francisco Ballet’s Program 2 was dubbed Classical Re(Vision) – a remembering of and reconnection with choreography in SFB’s existing repertory catalogue.
★★★★✰ 'Spellbound' delivered in every regard – opulent grandeur, terrific people watching and above all, marvelous dance.
★★★★✰ 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.
★★★★✰ After watching two of the four programs, a few things stand out. Firstly, it is clear that this is no simple gala, despite the format; there is a strong personal esthetic and philosophy at work behind the programs.
Boston Ballet closed its season with a generous offering of four ballets spanning almost 70 years... and including a world premiere and two company premieres...
The evening was full of surprises, not least that two of the three choreographers were women and that Jorma Elo broke radically new ground in his Bach Cello Suites...
All three performances brought home the fact that this is a very strong company with the skills to perform any choreography that comes its way...
At my first performance, Ashley Ellis was a first-rate Odette/Odile, giving a nearly flawless performance. (I’m assuming that flawless performances transpire only in Heaven or some other extraterrestial locale.)
To close its 50th anniversary season Boston Ballet mounted a splendid production of Balanchine’s 1967 masterpiece Jewels.
The evening ended with Alexander Ekman’s Cacti, one of the most wildly original, hilarious dances I’ve ever seen. If the Keystone Cops had taken up ballet, this is what they’d have looked like.
Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella is one of the great ballets of the 20th century and a triumph of his career.
As for the whole ballet, it’s a 19th century expression of the racist Orientalist view that says India is a land of groveling slaves and despotic rajahs, unbridled lust and pervasive corruption, abundant opium and yielding odalisques. ...Once past all that, however, it’s a lavish and thrilling spectacle with abundant pleasures for eye and ear.
Boston audiences were very lucky in their first two Swanildas. Opening night, Misa Kuranaga was a vision of loveliness...
Chroma: Perhaps it’s meant as a kind of sherbet to clear the palate between the Balanchine pieces... In short, I found the ballet dazzling but soulless.
The opening night Aurora and Désiré were danced by Misa Kuranaga and Jeffrey Cirio, a superbly matched couple who have become a standard in the company.
And together, Kuranaga and Cirio make a superb couple, performing with such sensitive musicality and balanced unison that it sometimes seems you’re watching a single composite creature.
And I’ll close with more praise of Maina Gielgud. I’ve never seen a ballet she’s set that hasn’t been absolutely first-rate. Boston Ballet has performed her Giselle for many years now and it’s easily my favorite Giselle, just as this production is now my favorite Don Quixote.
Symphony in Three Movements: This collaboration of two of the giants of 20th century art (Balanchine, Stravinsky) was clearly a marriage made in heaven, and thanks to Boston Ballet’s newest production, we got to attend the nuptials.