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Momoko Hirata and Mathias Dingman in Birthday Offering.
Pictures: Caroline Holden Ashton Classics Birmingham Royal Ballet Symphony Hall ***** BRB’s annual sortie to Symphony Hall is one of life’s little pleasures to see ballet almost as a cabaret act and Birmingham’s other world class symphony orchestra on its yearly day trip out into the light. The annual visit is the orchestra’s chance to shine, its moment in the limelight. The Royal Ballet Sinfonia are most often seen in Birmingham as an ethereal glow from beneath the stage at the Hippodrome, merely the providers of music for the dancing above them. Here they are on stage, seen as what they are, a wonderful symphony orchestra under BRB music director and principal conductor, Paul Murphy. The evening was a celebration of the works of the late Sir Frederick Ashton, world renowned choreographer and former director of The Royal Ballet, featuring music from ballets he had created in what is now seen as the English style. It opened with a party piece from the brass section with the Fanfare from Paul Dukas’ La Péri which Ashton first choreographed in 1931. Dukas’ best known work, incidentally, is The Sorcerer's Apprentice which eclipsed all his other works. That was followed by Birthday Offering, created by Ashton to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Saddler’s Wells Ballet as it became The Royal Ballet, set to music from Alexander Glazunov arranged by Robert Irving. This brought in a pas de deux from Momoko Hirata and Mathias Dingman. Momoko is always a delight to watch with her ability to turn feelings and emotions into exquisite dance. An outlier in the programme was the Interlinked pas de deux, danced by Tzu-Chao Chou and Jack Easton, which featured at the opening of The Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. The evening was dedicated to the memory of the late Caroline Miller, the company’s CEO who died of cancer at the end of last year. The piece, stylishly danced, was one of her favourites. The Sleeping Beauty, choreographed by Ashton in 1946 to cope with smaller casts, brought a virtuoso performance from the Sinfonia’s first violin and leader, Robert Gibbs, a distinguished soloist in his own right. It saw a return of Tzu-Chao Chou to dance the Sarabande, a solo for Prince Florimund and the Awakening pas de deux from the delightful Célene Gittens as PrincessAurora and Mason King as Prince Florimund.
Céline Gittens in the Awakening pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty The brought us to what is perhaps Ashton’s most famous work, and another of Caroline Miller’s favourites, the first ballet she ever saw, La Fille mal gardée, which gave us the chicken dance with August Generalli as the Cockerel, and Olivia Chang Clarke, Frieda Kaden and, from BRB2, BRB’s emerging talent company, Alisa Garkavenko from Ukraine and former Elmhurst pupil Sophie Walters as the chickens. This is ballet’s romantic comedy and adding to the fun is Rory Mackay, who has channeled his experience to develop into a skilled principal character dancer. He play’s the ballet’s panto Dame, Widow Simone, performing the clog dance with Rosanna Ely, Reina Fuchigami, Tessa Hogge and Rachele Pizzillo. The dance was inspired by Lancashire Clog Dancers, a northern tradition among the mill workers, and hats off to the ballerinas who managed en pointe in clogs! Wooden soled clogs, incidentally, were preferred to ordinary leather soled shoes in cotton mills as the floors were regularly watered to keep them wet to maintain high humidity, which was an essential for cotton spinning. The interval came after the Fanny Elssler pas de deux, named after the Austrian ballerina after Ashton came across music found in the archives of the Paris Opéra she had used for a pas de deux in her performance in 1837. It was danced wonderfully by Beatrice Parma and Lachlan Monaghan. The opening of part two brought head of piano Jeanette Wong, a masters graduate of Birmingham Royal Conservatoire, where she has been awarded an honorary fellowship this year. She has a wonderful touch and feeling when she plays and Rachmaninoff’s 18th variation in his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, written in 1934, must be one of the most beautiful piano pieces every written and perfect for her style. Ashton used it first in a ballet sequence for Moira Shearer in the 1953 film The Story of Three Loves, three separate romantic tales set on an ocean liner. Shearer, playing a ballerina, starred in the first, The Jealous Lover, along with James Mason.
Star ballet dancer turned movie star in a still from The Story of Three Loves He used it again in Rhapsody, created for the Queen Mother’s 80th Birthday Gala in 1980. Riku Ito danced a short solo before the opening theme of the18th variation brought on Yu Kurihara and Oscar Kempsey-Fagg in a superb, tender and romantic pas de deux in a perfect marriage of music and dance. The Sinfonia are partners with the Royal Ballet and Opera in the Constant Lambert Conduction Fellowship and one of its recipients, the Chinese conductor, Yi Wei, took over the baton for Dance for the followers of Leo from Lambert’s ballet Horoscope. Robert Gibbs was to shine again with the solo violin in the pas de deux from Jules Massenet’s Thaïs, danced beautifully by Sofia Liñares and Lachlan Monaghan while the final piece was Johann Strauss II’s Frühlingsstimmen, Op. 410, his orchestral waltz, created into a ballet piece by Ashton in 1977, and given the somewhat less challenging name of Voices of Spring. It was danced by Miki Mizutani and Max Maslan, opening with the ballerina carried aloft scattering rose petals over the stage. It’s a demanding piece with the lifts involved and the pair brought the evening to a close with commendable style. It is a fitting piece for a finale, bold, flamboyant, romantic and joyous. Symphony Hall is a venue with world class acoustics and is designed for music rather than stage shows, and in particular, as the name implies, symphony orchestras, and the Royal Ballet Sinfonia fit that bill quite superbly. As for the dancing, it was sublime and must be credited all the more so in the confines of the available performing space, a wide narrow strip at the front of the stage instead of the vast acreage of the Hippodrome’s cavernous stage. Dancing had to be linear with hardly any depth to work with and hats off to the cast manage to dance that well in such a restricted space. Next up for orchestra and dancers is David Bintley’s Cinderella which opens on Wednesday, 19 February. Roger Clarke 15-02-25 |
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