Word: ravelled
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...marvel that the original music has the strength to stand up to this kind of dilution, like a good Scotch to soda. Tomita's Pictures is no threat to Sviatoslav Richter's classic version of Mussorgsky's piano original, or the Toscanini interpretation of the expert Ravel orchestration. What Tomita does is pop art pure and simple. It is benevolent caricature, a funny-paper treatment of the classics for those who get nervous at the real thing...
...many of the funnies, Pictures is often funny. Listening to it on an RCA Quadradisc, one hears each of the first four notes of the opening "Promenade" from a different loudspeaker. Disconcerting, that. So, at first, is the fact that the sound is not Mussorgsky's piano or Ravel's trumpet, but one of human voices-or rather, canned choral sounds transmogrified by Tomita's Mellotron, an electronic keyboard device that plays prerecorded tapes. Things perk up considerably with the first picture, "The Gnome," a succession of subterranean squeaks and giggles that resemble a band of tipsy...
...dancing of Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes in the 1951 Sadler's Wells revival, but the public was cool to Choreographer Frederick Ashton's jarring transfer of the mythic lovers from the 3rd century B.C. to modern Greece. This spring, for New York City Ballet's Ravel Festival, John Taras confected an ill-favored mod-squad version that will probably be consigned to the choreographic trash can. George Balanchine flatly called the Ravel score, with its wildly eccentric rhythms, impossible. Nonetheless, because he was "madly in love with the music," Tetley plunged ahead. Said...
Balanchine first choreographed this mixed-media event for Téàtre de Mon te Carlo in 1925, shortly after he first met Ravel. Perhaps it would have been better to let the work retreat into decent obscurity. This new production is sumptuous by City Ballet standards, but the singers are nearly incomprehensible, the Daliesque sets poorly lit and the comic effects too often unfunny...
This season City Ballet confronts its stiffest artistic challenge ever. During the last three weekends of May, Hommage a Ravel, a centenary celebration of the French composer's birth, will feature a festival of 16 new ballets against a vast fresco of Ravel music. "In ballet there has to be something new every season," Balanchine explains calmly. "Also, Ravel was a Basque and all the Basques dance." Because the company cannot afford to close down even for a week, the new dances must be created and rehearsed while the company continues to perform the 36 ballets now in repertory...