Word: royalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...closer to realizing this dream than wagging a finger behind their program notes, or surreptitiously waving their arms in front of their hi-fi sets. Last week, a 52-year-old physician named Michael Bialoguski conducted the New Philharmonia Orchestra before 2,200 people in London's Royal Albert Hall - and it was all real...
...world's great classical-dance companies, Leningrad's Kirov preserves with museum-like fidelity the ballet traditions of Imperial Russia. The New York City Ballet dazzles the eye with its athletic vigor and the astonishing choreographic virtuosity of its creator, George Balanchine. What Britain's Royal Ballet offers above all else is the English style. Style it indubitably is: the Royal's approach to dance is essentially lyrical rather than dramatic, narrative instead of abstract. It offers an almost invisible way of dancing that emphasizes detail-perfect simplicity and linear beauty rather than energy and showmanship...
Last week, at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, the Royal celebrated the 20th anniversary of its first U.S. tour with the American premieres of two works that admirably displayed its body-English mode of dance. Jazz Calendar, the slighter piece, is a light-hearted series of variations on the old nursery rhyme that begins, "Monday's child is fair of face." Wednesday's child, who is "full of woe," is portrayed by Svetlana Beriosova as a studiously mournful, black-clad wraith, pursued by a clutching quartet of mottled, mock-serious snakes. Friday's children love...
Spirit and Place. A made-in-America company might bring more rhythmic pizazz to Calendar; none but the Royal could evoke the special virtues of Enigma Variations. Based on the orchestral score by Sir Edward Elgar, the work is a nostalgic visualization of a half-remembered spirit and place: green and pleasant England at the end of Victoria's reign. Before a stunning set by Julia Trevelyan Oman that at once suggests the languor of an autumnal afternoon and the oaken mellowness of a Worcestershire estate, the Royal's dancers bring to life the Malvern Circle of friends...
Both of the Royal's new works, appropriately, were created by Sir Frederick Ashton, the company's director since 1963 and, with Balanchine, one of the world's two finest living ballet choreographers. "If Fred is in the English tradition," says Dame Margot Fonteyn, "that is because he is the one who made it." Like Balanchine, though, Ashton began in the Russian tradition. Born in Ecuador, the son of a British businessman, he began studying ballet at the age of 18. Two years later, he worked with the company of Marie Rambert, for whom he produced...