Which provides a bizarre segue to the business of the weekend which was a visit to
see a performance of English National Ballet's production of Swan Lake.
I wasn't really looking forwards to it.
Autumn months bring with them the over-wintering birds and the skies over Crosby have been filled with flotillas of geese and ducks and other migrants.
Which provides a bizarre segue to the business of the weekend which was a visit to
see a performance of English National Ballet's production of Swan Lake.
I wasn't really looking forwards to it.
Ross and I had seen the company in the spring with an enjoyable but only averagely alright performance of Romeo and Juliet. Swan Lake, itself, I last saw in London in 1997 at Covent Garden and in the Matthew Bourne male swans production. The auguries weren't great.
In the event, it was a fab night out. The first act was rather less naff than it usually is but it does seems as though it is traditionally the place for the younger members of the company to show their relative lack of skills. We had one tumble and an inordinate amount of unsychronised movement.
But the work pretty soon got a grip. Derek Deane was a dancer at the Royal Ballet when I worked in the Box Office during the 1977-78 season. Whilst not the best dancer of his generation, his was one of the most reliable and was trotted out for all the Saturday matinées. Those years in the trenches have obviously given him a sense of what audiences want because the production was pleasing to the eye, told a story well and provided ample choreography for the principals to dig into.
Dimitri Gruzdyev was our Prince Siegfried and he acquitted himself perfectly well. The star, however, was Elena Glurdjidze in the dual Odette/Odille rôle. Where to begin? Well, her balance was phenomenal, not a wobble in sight when she was up on her toes with every limb at full stretch (there's probably a technical term for what she was doing but blowed if I know). And her body shapes were precise and completely with the pulse of the music. And she danced as though it all meant something and was part of a character and had resonance beyond the performance space. I confess that I was profligate with my applause.
One quick aside also for the music making. The band were dreadful for the Romeo and Juliet earlier in the year. On Saturday, they played their socks off. A particular mention for the leader of the orchestra who took the difficult solo violin part in the second act by the scruff of the neck and not only made musical sense of it but also made dramatic sense of it.
When I was mentioning all of this to Roland, he very properly noted that I've not been very enthusiastic about anything of late. Well, I was enthusiastic about that performance. A good measure of its effect is that Ross and I both want to go and see some more dance. ENB are doing Nutcracker in Manchester in November. Maybe, we'll make the effort to go and see that.