Word: ballets
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Such divergence from the stereotyped passion often associated with Bizet's opera is characteristic of Choreographer John Cranko and his Stuttgart Ballet. Last week the company presented its new Carmen as part of a six-week stand in New York that will be followed by a road tour lasting until August. Cranko had sat through scores of Carmen operas, and he says "I always thought they were all wrong. If you see in Carmen nothing but a nymphomaniac who meets a tenor, seduces him, gets tired of him, then meets a bullfighter-it's a bore." Instead...
Dissonant Morass. Not everybody liked it-and with reason. As one expects of Cranko, the ballet had dramatic cohesiveness. Settings, cleverly suggestive of Goya, managed to be both beautiful and forbidding at the same time. In Marcia Haydée (Carmen), Richard Cragun (the Toreador) and Egon Madsen (Don José), Cranko could field a trio whose ability to project feeling into narrative ballet can hardly be matched. What went wrong was the music. Scorning Bizet, Cranko got German Composer Wolfgang Fortner to produce a dreadful, cacophonous "Bizet collage" incapable of sustaining any nuance of emotion. Worse, the score picked...
...been shrouded in melancholy: dim lighting, failed hope, blunted ambition. But in the intensely personal, Ziegfeld-like "Loveland" sequence, lights and color suddenly challenge the eye, an umber paintbox opened in the sun. This visual dazzle is reminiscent of Vincente Minnelli's movie musicals ?notably the focal ballet in An American in Paris. Onstage, it has never been mounted with such unfailing skill...
...season sounds incredible [March 29]. Cop turned priest? How about featuring a bulldozer operator turned brain surgeon, a Sumo wrestler who moonlights as a ballet dancer or a defensive lineman who embroiders baby clothes to pay for a hamburger franchise...
Freeze-Dried Piquancy. Fireworks dazzled Diaghilev, and the impresario commissioned Stravinsky to write a ballet. The result was the Tartared and feathered The Firebird (1910). This was followed a year later by the even more brilliant Petrouchka, in which the solo piano part projected a Pierrot-like puppet at a Russian fair-a part realized on the stage by the great Nijinsky. Both works were to remain Stravinsky's most popular with the public, to his eventual dismay. They also established his lifelong identification with the dance, which in later years produced notable collaborations with George Balanchine...