Meeting Ulyana Lopatkina is a daunting experience. Even as she greets you in the street in jeans, she clearly belongs in a more rarefied realm: her serious nod and striking beauty are both startling, and she wears her near-religious approach to her art on her sleeve. The most trivial questions are greeted with barely...
Read more →With a different production more or less every night for three weeks, the Hamburg Ballet’s annual festival allows the audience to dive into John Neumeier’s world in a rather unique manner, and the 2012 edition didn’t disappoint. After Liliom, which I reviewed for the Financial Times, three very different shows concluded the Ballet-Days: a...
Read more →2011 may feel like a blur already, but looking back - what a rollercoaster it has been for ballet. From the Black Swan controversies to Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev's "defection" to the Mikhailovsky on the eve of the reopening of the Bolshoi's historical stage, the ballet world has had its fair share of...
Read more →Le Ballet du Mariinsky était de retour à Londres cet été, et j’ai eu le plaisir d’assister à leurs deux derniers programmes sur la scène du Royal Opera House, Anna Karénine et La Bayadère. Pas de critique cette fois, mais un petit papier d’information pour Le Monde, paru dans l’édition du 13 août :...
Read more →The New York Times published earlier this week a beautiful slide show designed to introduce local audiences to the Mariinsky Ballet, which is currently touring New York with Anna Karenina, The Little Humpbacked Horse, Carmen-Suite and Symphony in C. NYT dance critic Claudia La Rocco kindly asked me for my thoughts on casting, and...
Read more →Carmen-Suite / Scotch Symphony / Etudes Fernando Alonso, George Balanchine, Harald Lander Mariinsky Ballet Festspielhaus Baden-Baden December 28, 2010 Few would picture Ulyana Lopatkina, the Maryinsky’s hieratic queen, as Carmen, and yet her turn in Fernando Alonso’s Carmen-Suite was the one fully realized performance of the Gala that closed the Maryinsky’s traditional Christmas tour...
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