Word: firebirds
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...roomy, rococo City Center theater (converted from an old Shrine auditorium), the curtain went up on Marc Chagall's Firebird sets, and the audience gasped with pleasure. The brilliant red-and-blue sets, commissioned four years ago by Impresario Sol Hurok for Ballet Theatre, had been picked up by low-budget City Center at cut-rate. But the sets, gay though they were, were the oldest feathers on the new Firebird...
...flashing first-scene duet of tall, part-Osage Indian Ballerina Maria Tallchief (the fourth Mrs. Balanchine*) as the Firebird and Francisco Moncion as the Prince brought a touchdown roar from the audience. In the second scene, Balanchine managed to move the evil Kostchei and his 40 demons back & forth diagonally in four groups, so that City Center's scant (40-ft.) stage always seemed full of excitement but never cluttered. Throughout, it was the most stunning ballet production Manhattan balletomanes had seen in many a moon. With the final curtain, the audience set up the kind of clamor that...
...Manhattan Tax Lawyer Morton Baum, chairman of City Center's executive committee (and a director of the Metropolitan Opera as well), the enthusiasm seemed to justify a little spreading out. This season Balanchine was able to add to his repertory four ballets, including Firebird and a smashing new Bourèe Fantasque premièred later in the week...
...packed Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House last week for the opening of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the wiry, sandy-haired little conductor who took the podium for the second ballet looked vaguely familiar. When he began to conduct, it was with some of the flapping firebird motions of Igor Stravinsky. But it was not Igor. It was his son, Soulima Stravinsky (TIME, July 26, 1948), who was making his U.S. debut as a conductor and composer...
Soulima, 39 ("born between Firebird and Petrouchka"), lives with his wife Franchise and son Jean, 4, only a few bars and beats away from Igor in Hollywood. But he has not yet found much time to visit with the man he usually refers to as "my father," but sometimes as "Stravinsky." He has been too busy "living with Scarlatti" (he will record some sonatas for Allegro records this week) and preparing for his first U.S. piano concert tour. All summer, he taught piano six hours a day at the Music Academy of the West, in Santa Barbara...