Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Stravinsky: Les Noces (Vienna Chamber Choir, four soloists, four pianos and percussion, conducted by Mario Rossi; Vanguard). The subject is a rustic wedding, and the pagan, mechanistic music (written for the Diaghilev ballet of 1923) is built around folk sources. Memorable qualities: the jabbing momentum in the accompaniment and the jerky rhythms of the chorus, which nevertheless convey the feeling of high good spirits. Fine performance...
...industry (including the old saw that "advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission"), and there was a pleasant nostalgia to his re-creation of Allen's Alley. The remainder of Omnibus' 90 minutes was devoted to some mildly interesting but hardly experimental films: the escape of two ballet dancers from behind the Iron Curtain and a U.S. travelogue...
...Roughly comparable to the Ballet Russe's late great Vaslav Nijinsky, who, asked how he made his incredible floating leaps, once explained: "You have just to go up and pause there a little...
...Drama, the show never got airborne. Funnyman Shawn opened with a long and painfully unfunny monologue about the Confederacy, while Allen and Holliday were given little material with which to overcome that initial handicap. The best number featured Judy as a short-order waitress who gets involved in a ballet rehearsal; the most tedious-except for confirmed balletomanes - was a 20-minute dance revolving about a filling station...
...scion of one of Rus sia's great feudal families. Prince Youssoupoff's great-grandmother was Emperor Nicholas I's mistress, and his great-greatgrandfather was a lover of Catherine the Great. The old rake was so rich he had a private theater and ballet, and so dissolute that when he waved his cane all dancers appeared on stage stark naked. Young Prince Felix married a niece of the Czar, vowed he would save the 300-year-old Romanoff dynasty by assassinating Rasputin, the magnetic evil genius of the Czar and Czarina. On the night...