Word: ballets
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Moscow's massive Bolshoi Ballet approaches the great classics of dance-Swan Lake, for example, or Giselle-as if they were museum pieces on the move, as many of them are. The Russians' excessive awe of tradition can be a hindrance when it comes to creating new choreography. A striking case in point is Yuri Grigorovich's Ivan the Terrible, which was given its American premiere at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House last week by a large touring company of the Bolshoi. Grigorovich is probably the Soviet Union's finest classical choreographer...
Like Sergei Eisenstein's film classic-the score is based largely on Prokofiev's music for that movie-the ballet is an episodic, ponderously romanticized narrative about Czar Ivan IV. A madman and a tyrant, Ivan fought the feudal boyar nobles as well as invading enemies and managed to unite Russia during the 16th century. There are scenes evoking his struggle with the nobles, lyrical moments of happiness with his first wife, Anastasia, plotting by the boyars and the duplicitous Prince Kurbsky, who tries to destroy Ivan by poisoning his queen. After her death, the Czar...
...Ivan, a role danced at the premiere by Yuri Vladimirov. An extraordinarily lithe actor with a frazzled mane and long simian arms, Vladimirov in his mad scenes looked oddly like a bemused orangutan who had suddenly been set loose from a zoo. That effect was heightened in the ballet's unintentionally ludicrous climax, when the paranoid Czar, hopelessly entangled among bell ropes, dangles above a crowd of foot-stomping peasants...
Piano and Paintbrush. After arriving in the U.S. in 1953 with his own folk-dance company, Holder spent two years as a principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. He has choreographed works for the Alvin Ailey company and the Dance Theater of Harlem. His paintings, mostly lush impressionist nudes, hang in the Corcoran Gallery, the Barbados Museum and Historical Society and the homes of, among others, William Buckley and Barbara Walters. As an actor, he has appeared on Broadway (the 1957 revival of Waiting for Godot) and in films (Live and Let Die, Doctor Dolittle). He is the author...
...startled staid English audiences after World War I with his chromaticism and unusual instrumental combinations in works like Rout (for ten instruments and a soprano who sings nonsense syllables) and A Colour Symphony. He later wrote film scores, notably for the 1939 H.G. Wells' fantasy Things to Come, ballet music (including The Lady of Shalott for the San Francisco Ballet) and an opera, The Olympians, with a libretto by J.B. Priestley. Named court composer in 1953, the musical equivalent of poet laureate, Bliss also composed dozens of pieces for royal occasions from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth...