Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...novelty on the program was Falla's ballet music El Amor Brujo, the best known section of which is the Ritual Dance of Fire. Based on Spanish folk spirit, Falla's music is exotic, feverish, and sometimes haunting. Soloist Malama Providakes sang with an idiomatic flavor reminiscent of the great contralto Conchita Supervia, with a dark, full-blooded tone. There were several lovely Oboe solos from Cynthia Deery, while the Orchestra as a whole played with both fire and precision...
...successfully combined with the sound tract when Stravinsky's Rite of Spring sets the tempo for the creation of Earth, and the growth of life upon it, including a battle between two prehistoric monsters. In contrast, Disney parodies Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" in a fine comic ballet of elephants, hippotamuses, alligators and ostriches...
...evening's ballet was Romeo and Juliet, danced in settings of overwhelming -if old-fashioned-grandeur and verisimilitude. The dancing, to the Prokofiev score and with few differences from the ballet film now showing in the U.S.. was heavily larded with emotion-laden pantomime. But fragile Ballerina Galina Ulanova danced lightly as a wind-wafted feather in spite of her 46 years. Most critics were ecstatic. The Times critic described her as "now like a flame on the ground, now like a flame leaping in the air." Wrote the News Chronicle: "Her arms and hands raised in flight...
Director Arnold Haskell wrote that it was "the most reactionary ballet it is possible to imagine. Its virtues and its faults are those of half a century ago." But the applauding crowd. Prime Minister Anthony Eden among them, could not clap enough. In return the audience got a traditional Russian reaction: the entire cast and Bolshoi officials stood on the stage and applauded back...
...Sylphides. In Winnipeg, after he quit as ballet master of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet because a danseuse was given too much authority, Nenad Lhotka got a job in the city's railway sheds, observed that lifting freight is "nothing compared to some of those ballerinas...