Word: cranko
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. John Cranko, 45, reigning master of full-length story ballet; apparently of a heart attack; while flying from Philadelphia to Stuttgart. Born in South Africa, Cranko came to London at the age of 19; by the time he was 24 he had become principal choreographer of the Sadler's Wells Ballet. In 1961 he took over the mediocre Stuttgart Ballet. With his strong sense of theater and his ability to marry dance and plot, Cranko scored dramatic successes with such works as Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake and Eugene Onegin. The Stuttgart, under his direction, became...
...moment of intensive, moving theatricality-the visual and emotional high point of John Cranko's Traces, which was given its American première last week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House by the magnificent Stuttgart Ballet. Traces is the portrayal of a woman who has escaped from totalitarian horrors but has yet to come to terms with those past agonies. Her present is visualized by some amiable bourgeois friends and a courtly but uncomprehending lover (Heinz Clauss...
Traces grandly illustrates one particular strength of Cranko's inventive -sometimes too inventive-choreography: his gift for narration and characterization. He may, in fact, be ballet's finest storyteller. Two other Cranko works, which had their U.S. premières last week-and which will be repeated later during the Stuttgart Company's six-week American tour-displayed, in varying degrees, his flair for abstract dance...
...Estro Armonico (The Harmony of Being) is vintage Cranko (1963) that turns out to be a rather mechanical stu dio exercise in balletic geometry. Soloists on stage cavort to solo instrumental moments from three Vivaldi concert! while the ensemble blends with orchestral passages. Plotless but pretty, the work does show off the almost Bolshoi-like muscularity of the Stuttgart's unusually strong male corps and the gamine pertness of lithe Birgit Keil...
...Cranko has described the work "as a ballet for four friends." Brahms' Second Piano Concerto was chosen as the score, the program notes explain, be cause of the composer's "passionate feeling for friendship and love." In an awkward bit of balletic literalness, Cranko carries out the friendship gim mick by having the four principals periodically link up on stage in studied poses of togetherness. Initials takes flight, however, when the soloists are left to perform the stunning variations that Cranko has devised for them. R., in particular, stands for remarkable, when Cragun almost nonchalantly shows...