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| Arts Calendar / January 31 / Ballet |
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Ballet to music by Jules Massenet. 190 min (with two intermissions). Choreography: Kenneth McMillan. Music Director and Conductor: Felix Korobov. Manon was MacMillan’s second three-act ballet as artistic director of the Royal Ballet. He based his scenario on the 1731 novel by the Abbé Prévost, L’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut. Various musical numbers out of different works by Jules Massenet were selected and orchestrated by Leighton Lucas. Assisting MacMillan was also the ballet troupe’s coach Hilda Gont. She helped him to select the music for the pas de deux with which he, after his custom, began the work on the ballet. Nicholas Georgiadis’ designs reflect the precarious division between opulence and degradation in pre-Revolutionary France (the ballet is set later in the 18th century than Prevost’s novel). MacMillan was quoted as saying that he found his clue to Manon’s behavior in her background of poverty: ‘Manon is not so much afraid of being poor as ashamed of being poor. Poverty in that period was the equivalent of long, slow death’. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theater |
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Ballet in two acts to music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. 160 min (with one interval). Script outline after Vladimir Begitchev and Vasily Geltser. Musical Director and Conductor: Pavel Sorokin. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote a little ballet about swans for his nieces and nephews. The story of the ballet is based on a German fairy tale. Swan Lake is a ballet that has become a symbol of Russian art itself. World premiere of Swan Lake took place at Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on 20 February 1877, the choreographer of the production was Julius Resinger. Despite the fact, his work was considered unsuccessful by the critics of the day, Resinger’s original production of Swan Lake was kept in the active repertoire of the Bolshoi Theatre for seven years and was performed over thirty times. The second birth of the performance was on 15 January 1895 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. The revival by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov is a basis for most ballet companies, staging Swan Lake nowadays. The Swan Lake performance survived for more than a century without any significant changes since Maruis Petipa’s times and nowadays is being staged in more than 290 theatres all over the world. Bolshoi Theater |
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