Word: firebird
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...about that point, one night last week, Sadler's Wells Star Margot Fonteyn ceased to be a ballerina and became the bird she intended to portray. The ballet: Firebird, dreamed up in 1910 for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes by the late, style-making Choreographer Michel Fokine and style-shaking Composer Igor Stravinsky...
...girls went into low-pressure love rites. The Russian fairy tale plot darkened further-got so dark, in fact, that only the program notes could make it almost clear. A gang of leaping fiends, Tartars and scimitarists introduced a horrid wizard (mimed by Frederick Ashton), but the Firebird returned and forced the whole evil crew to dance on and on to exhaustion. Then the hunter smashed the giant egg that contained the wizard's soul and married the beautiful princess. Curtain...
...Firebird was no novelty to the U.S. The Col. de Basil company toured it in the '40s, and George Balanchine's New York City Ballet has done a shortened version -carefully avoiding such delicacies as the soul-in-the-egg. The Sadler's Wells version was faithful to the original choreography of 1910. In fact, it captured the old spirit so well that the once-daring Stravinsky music began to sound just like Mussorgsky with wrong notes...
...time, it was greeted by New Yorkers as an old friend. Indeed, it had not changed. Along with its 48 tons of imposing scenery and costumes, it brought a repertory that included a familiar full-length Swan Lake, a new production of Coppelia, a restaging of Fokine's Firebird; all these are ballets reaching to a wide public that cares less for pirouettes than for the pageantry of a world peopled by kings and queens, wicked magicians and good fairies in butterfly-drawn coaches...
...part consisted of ordinary flute, piano and vocal sounds, recorded and then sometimes distorted beyond recognition by various mechanical and electronic means. The composition got notice as far away as Baltimore, where the Sun protested: "Down with Space Music . . . Give us a penny whistle." Sandwiched between Stravinsky's Firebird and Paul Creston's Symphony No. 3, the work actually was surprisingly gentle on the ears; by comparison, the unidentifiable flutings and reverberations from the machine sounded only slightly outlandish...