A couple of ballet scores which deserve to be better known

[alywin]

English National Ballet are at the London Coliseum this week performing a production of Alexander Glazunov's marvellous "Raymonda" - a score which really deserves far more attention than it gets :(

Also, for your delectation (and maybe delight, but I realise it won't be everyone's cup of tea), this Sunday night on BBC4 at around 9 pm there's a broadcast of the Royal Ballet's The Dante Project, with an excellent score by Thomas Ades which deserves to be heard. The first part, Inferno, does borrow rather liberally from Liszt, and I understand was greeted with standing ovations when it premiered in Los Angeles pre-you-know-what. Part 2 is very different, and based on chants from a Syrian synagogue, I think it was. Presumably the whole thing will be on the iPlayer for a month afterwards, too. I've just finished streaming it off the ROH website, and was hugely impressed by the quality.

[silvestrione]

English National Ballet are at the London Coliseum this week performing a production of Alexander Glazunov's marvellous "Raymonda" - a score which really deserves far more attention than it gets :(

Also, for your delectation (and maybe delight, but I realise it won't be everyone's cup of tea), this Sunday night on BBC4 at around 9 pm there's a broadcast of the Royal Ballet's The Dante Project, with an excellent score by Thomas Ades which deserves to be heard. The first part, Inferno, does borrow rather liberally from Liszt, and I understand was greeted with standing ovations when it premiered in Los Angeles pre-you-know-what. Part 2 is very different, and based on chants from a Syrian synagogue, I think it was. Presumably the whole thing will be on the iPlayer for a month afterwards, too. I've just finished streaming it off the ROH website, and was hugely impressed by the quality.

I watched this last night on iplayer. i don't know much about ballet, but am reasonably well-informed on Dante, and I thought the design and lighting and costumes, the whole feel of the first section, was stunning, and I certainly identified some scenes. I could take or leave the Purgatory section (though charming to have the episode from Dante's childhood represented), but the Paradiso was again visually so impressive, with very effective back-projections to suggest the journey up through the planets/spheres. But why not use in the dance the patterns described in the text, made by the spirits? Perhaps they did and I missed it. Music: Inferno was indeed Lisztian pastiche, very danceable no doubt. The music got more interesting from part 2 on (variations was it? on the Syrian chant?)

[rauschwerk]

My wife and I went to see Raymonda on Saturday, and we had a most enjoyable time. I find that (unlike, say, Tchaikovsky's) Glazunov's nice tunes have a habit of going in one ear and out the other, but the music was splendidly played under the direction of Gavin Sutherland. ENB Director Tamara Rojo has made an excellent job of working out a new story using the existing choreography (Marius Petipa) and the dancing seemed uniformly excellent to me.