American Ballet Theater Performs The Classic "Swan Lake"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 17 July 2023 15:36

Written by Jack Angstreich

Skylar Brandt and Herman Cornejo in Swan Lake. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor.

At the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center on the evening of Thursday, July 13th, I had the incomparable pleasure of attending a superb—at moments even transcendent—presentation of American Ballet Theater’s beautiful production of the magnificent, immensely popular Swan Lake.

The ballet would be immortal if only for Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s incredible score—here expertly conducted by Ormsby Wilkins—one of the greatest in the repertory. The dazzling choreography is by former Artistic Director Kevin McKenzie after that of the legendary Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. The attractive sets and wonderful costumes are by Zack Brown, with effective and at times brilliant lighting by Duane Schuler.

The exceptional primary cast was notable above all for the extraordinary Skylar Brandt—who enthralled the previous week in the title role of Giselle—as Odette-Odile; she astonished in probably the finest of her many performances that I have seen. Her partner in the less spectacular role of Prince Siegfried was the outstanding Herman Cornejo—one of the best male dancers in the company and who also excelled in Giselle—and his brilliant solos in Act III were virtually a model of perfection. Roman Zhurbin and Andrii Ishchuk were both admirable in the two incarnations of von Rothbart, the evil sorcerer.

The secondary cast was also uniformly exemplary and I will for reasons of space name only the most prominent. Anabel Katsnelson, Erica Lall and Tyler Maloney (who also played Benno, the prince’s friend) together danced the delightful Pas de Trois in Act I. The episode of the Cygnettes in Act II is one of the most thrilling in the ballet and it was scintillatingly realized here by Zimmi Coker, Nicole Graniero (replacing Breanne Granlund), Betsy McBride, and Luciana Paris while the indelible dance of the Two Swans was enchantingly executed by Sierra Armstrong and Fangqi Li. The main roles in the exquisite divertissements of Act III were memorably performed by: Léa Fleytoux as the Hungarian Princess, Lauren Bonfiglio as the Spanish Princess, Rachel Richardson as the Italian Princess, and Kanon Kimura as the Polish Princess; Paulina Waski and Duncan Lyle in the Czardas; Isadora Loyola, João Mengussi, Paris again, and Patrick Frenette in the Spanish Dance; and Carlos Gonzalez and Melvin Lawovi in the Neapolitan Dance. The non-dancing roles were played by Nancy Raffa as the Queen Mother, and Alexei Agoudine as Wolfgang, tutor to the prince (and as the Master of Ceremonies in Act III). The superior corps de ballet was laudable on the whole and sometimes sublime—as at the conclusion—if occasionally slightly under-rehearsed.

The artists received an unusually enthusiastic ovation.

Ballet Theater’s summer season concludes the following week with a powerful production of Kenneth MacMillan’s terrific Romeo and Juliet with a magisterial score by Sergei Prokofiev.

Shakespeare in the Park Review—“Hamlet” in Central Park

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 14 July 2023 19:34

Written by Kevin Filipski

Ato Blankson-Wood and Solea Pfeiffer in Hamlet (photo: Joan Marcus)

Second Evening With The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Mesmerizes

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 13 July 2023 15:29

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Cherylynn Tsushima

At Alice Tully Hall, on the evening of Tuesday, July 11th, I had the great pleasure to attend another excellent concert—of nineteenth and twentieth century French and Russian compositions for wind ensembles—presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the second of four in its Summer Evenings series. 

The program began very promisingly with an admirable account of the charming and inventive—at moments, even exquisite—Caprice on Danish and Russian Airs of 1887 by Camille Saint-Saëns, with Adam Walker on the flute, James Austin Smith on the oboe, David Shifrin on clarinet, and Michael Stephen Brown on piano. Program annotator Kathryn Bacasmot provides some interesting background on the history of the work:

In 1887, Saint-Saëns invited oboist Georges Gillet, clarinetist Charles Turban, and flutist Paul Taffanel to participate in a tour to Saint Petersburg for a series of concerts with the Imperial Opera Orchestra. The Caprice on Danish and Russian Airs was written specifically for the visit and dedicated to the Empress Maria Feodorovna, who was born a Danish Princess (Dagmar of Denmark). 

She adds:

Despite some disruptive bouts with cold temperatures and snow, the performances were extremely well received, with the audience particularly impressed by the wind players’ virtuosity. One anecdote relates that Anton Rubinstein, founder and director of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, was so impressed he required all of the wind instrument students to attend one of the concerts. 

Brown returned to the stage along with horn-player David Byrd-Marrow for an admirable version of another appealing piece: the Villanelle of 1905 by Paul Dukas. Again, Bacasmot is informative here:

The composition of Villanelle came out of a particularly unusual series of events. For five years between 1900 and 1905, Maurice Ravel failed to win the Prix de Rome, a situation so preposterous that it ballooned into a full-scale scandal, known as “L’affaire Ravel.” The culprit became comically obvious when all of the 1905 finalists were discovered to be the students of one jury member. In the aftermath, Gabriel Fauré was hired as the new director of the Conservatoire, which administered the prize, and was tasked with rehabilitating the respectability of the institution. As part of his slew of reforms, Fauré decided new examination repertoire was needed and approached Dukas to fulfill the commission for Professor Brémond’s horn class. Since Dukas was rushing to finish other work, he pushed the completion of the examination piece to the last minute, relaying in a letter to his publisher, “I finished it yesterday at one thirty in the morning, after having received a telegram from Fauré telling me that Brémont [sic] was tearing out his hair!” The examination competitions were open to the public, but the first concert performance outside the Conservatoire took place in the Salle Érard in January 1907, and the work was swiftly adopted into the repertoire of performers.

The first half of the event concluded enjoyably with an accomplished performance of the striking Quintet of Jean Françaix from 1948, for which Walker, Smith, Shifrin and Byrd-Marrow were joined by bassoonist Marc Goldberg. Bacasmot notes the following:

The Quintet was written on a commission from the principal horn of the French Radio Orchestra, Louis Courtinat, who sought a work that demanded a high level of virtuosity from each player. Françaix delivered, noting with amusement that “When they sight-read the piece, they found that I had been a little over-zealous.”

The opening movement begins eccentrically and is playful on the whole: equally quirky and ludic is the second, marked Presto, but with a slower, more introspective Trio section. The ensuing Andante is more sustainedly inward—even, at times, lyrical—with some of the work’s most beautiful writing, while the finale is cheerful and propulsive.

Even stronger was the second half of the concert, starting with a remarkable version of François Poleunc’s ingenious Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano from 1926, which opens dramatically although the main body of the movement is vivacious—but with a meditative, more somber interlude—and, like the work in general, overtly classicizing. The succeeding Andante con moto is plaintive, if acquiring some sense of urgency at intervals, and the finale, is sprightly, with some dreamy passages—the placement of quotations from the Scherzo of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony amidst the modernist inflections creates an unusual effect.

The program closed marvelously with a superior realization of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s enchanting—and according to Shifrin, seldom played—Quintet in B-flat major for Flute, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, and Piano from 1876 about which Bacasmot recounts:

Two of Rimsky-Korsakov’s early chamber works, his String Sextet and his Wind Quintet in B-flat major, were written in 1876 and entered into a competition. The disappointing outcome was recounted by Rimsky- Korsakov in his memoir, My Musical Life:

The fate of my Sextet and my Quintet (sent in for the prize competition) was as follows. The jury awarded the prize to Napravnik’s Trio with the motto “God loves Trinity” (all good things come in threes); it found my Sextet worthy of honourable mention but disregarded my quintet entirely along with the works of other competitors. It was said that Leschetizky had played Napravnik’s Trio beautifully at sight for the jury, whereas my Quintet had fallen into hands of Cross, a mediocre sight reader, who had made such a fiasco of it that the work was not even heard to the end. Had my Quintet been fortunate in the performer, it would surely have attracted the jury’s attention. Its fiasco at the competition was undeserved, nevertheless, for it pleased the audience greatly, when Y. Goldstein played it subsequently at a concert of the Saint Petersburg Chamber Music Society.

The energetic first movement—and the piece as a whole—is surprisingly classical for a composer noted for his Romantic nationalism while the Andante is exceptionally pretty; the memorable Allegretto finale is jocular and spirited. The artists earned an appreciative reception.

The series continues on the early evening of Sunday, July 16th.