Word: ashtons
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...City Ballet's Tchaikovsky gala, a ten-day tribute to the Russian composer that also honored the company's legendary George Balanchine, 77. Then London's Royal Ballet held sway at Lincoln Center for three weeks, offering several works by Balanchine's contemporary Sir Frederick Ashton...
Along with classics, the company has unveiled many new ballets, chiefly by Ashton and current Principal Choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, 51. On this trip the Royal brought three works new to U.S. audiences: Ashton's Rhapsody, a glittering display originally created for Mikhail Baryshnikov; MacMillan's Gloria, a dark ode to the generation killed in the Great War, set to the bright strains of Poulenc; and Isadora, also by MacMillan, a tasteless, breast-baring melodrama about Modern Dance Pioneer Isadora Duncan, with a pastiche score by Richard Rodney Bennett. In addition, the Royal performed, for the first time...
...Although Ashton retired as the Royal's director and principal choreographer in 1970 after 35 years with the company, he remains active, casting and rehearsing his ballets. "Some of the dancers ask for me specifically," he notes. "They get something from me they don't get from other people." A master of crisp classicism, Ashton cannot read music, but his feeling for it is strong. "My reaction is spontaneous," he says. "Once I've chosen the music for a ballet, I completely inundate myself in it. I listen to nothing else, so that it becomes part...
Rhapsody is a plotless, technical tour de force, brilliantly danced by the suave Anthony Dowell in a version slightly revised from the original seen in London a year ago. Dowell also danced the lead in Ashton's 1976 narrative ballet A Month in the Country, inspired by Turgenev and Chopin. One of Ashton's supremely bittersweet works, it demonstrates, together with Rhapsody, the septuagenarian's continuing artistic vitality...
...after an unprecedented 13 weeks of rehearsal last fall and a 17-week national tour was his new star: the corps de ballet. Its members are younger, more attractive, tirelessly drilled. On opening night they danced with unity, grace and fervor. Baryshnikov revived one of the gala ballets, Frederick Ashton's feather-light Les Rendezvous, just to show off the corps. He has high hopes for these girls in white tulle and pink ribbons and their cavaliers...