Download or read book The Ballets of Alexander Glazunov written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov (1865–1936), the Russian composer, is principally associated with his first ballet Raymonda, the apex of his cooperation with the great choreographer Marius Petipa, then in the last years of his illustrious career. Raymonda is still performed in Russia and intermittently in the West. Glazunov, a precocious musical talent from his childhood, was regarded as the inheritor of the Russian nationalist ideals. However, he soon turned to absolute forms of music, rather than the thematically inspired tone paintings so typical of the Mighty Handful. His symphonic compositions are nonetheless full of Russian folk allusion. His emotional world seems to have been centred in the atmosphere of the classical Russian ballet. The movements in his abstract orchestral scores seem to reflect a glamorous, glittering world. He was the composer of four masterful dance compositions: Scènes de Ballet, Op. 52 (1894), Raymonda, Op. 57 (1898), Les Ruses d’Amour, Op. 61 (1900), and The Seasons, Op. 67 (1900). All became major works in the sunset of the Imperial Ballet, and remain landmarks in the history of theatre music for the dance. Glazunov appears to have been a warm and genial man, a firm friend and modest about his considerable accomplishments. As a teacher he in turn exercised considerable influence on the younger generation through his composition classes at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he also became director. His life was outwardly uneventful, but single-minded in pursuit of his musical ideals. He was full of honours when he died in Paris on 21 March 1936. The suite Scènes de Ballet, Opus 52 in 8 movements, was written in 1894, and published the following year, dedicated to the orchestra of the Russian Opera, St Petersburg. It was first performed at a concert of the Imperial Music Society in 1895, with the composer conducting from the manuscript score. Each section of this work is structured with great confidence, developed with a magisterial certainty, and defined in its own ideal musical character (Introduction, Marionnettes, Mazurka, Scherzo, Pas d’action, Danse orientale, Valse, Polonaise), and shows the composer’s instinctive feel for the dance and its various genres. In Raymonda, a romance tale of the Crusades, Glazunov provided a very considerable ballet score, conceived on the broadest scale for an extended scenario. Some of the scenes, and some of the melodies and tone colours of this ballet pay homage to the Tchaikovskian tradition. The story serves as the pretext for a series of divertissements, almost too profuse, intended to show off the virtuosity and special gifts of the famous soloists. Glazunov was inspired to compose agreeable music, always easy to listen to, sometimes rather bland in its melodic facility, but always showing the composer’s great mastery of form, harmony and orchestration. It misses the nobility of inner expressiveness and melodic urgency inherent in Tchaikovsky’s music. The act 2 finale especially achieves elegance of form and harmonic audacity, and reveals a firm contrapuntal technique. This work has always been able to stimulate the acting abilities of the great ballerinas. In Russia, where it is still danced, there was a revitalizing revival and production in 1900 directed by the choreographer Gorsky at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. After the October Revolution it was often staged, both at the Kirov in Leningrad and at the Bolshoi. The Seasons has no story as such, and unfolds in four scenes as an evocation of the yearly phases of the natural world. Each is represented by a number of episodes, some amorous, others idyllic, but all dominated by the natural cycle of winter sleep, spring awakening, summer blossoming, and autumn harvest, moving towards sleep again. This was Glazunov’s third ballet, the most important and successful of his works for the dance. As a pupil of Rimky-Korsakov, and heir to the Mighty Handful, he was by then the author of a very considerable body of compositions. The Seasons belongs to the pre-Diaghilev tradition of Russian ballet that found its culmination in Tchaikovsky’s three masterpieces in the genre. Glazunov shared something of Tchaikovsky’s passion for clarity and elegance, and an insistence on the primacy of melody. The fourth scene (Autumn) is best known for its fervent and rhapsodic bacchanale, a display of orchestral pyro-technics. The music is inventive, fresh, attractive, and beautifully scored throughout.

Download or read book Melodie arabe written by Aleksandr Konstantinovich Glazunov and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Five Ballets from Paris and St Petersburg written by Doug Fullington and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-26 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers something entirely new: detailed scene-by-scene descriptions of the action and dancing of Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda, bringing the reader far closer to what the audience saw when the curtain went up on these five classic story ballets than has heretofore been possible. Drawing on archival documents, the authors show that these ballets were like today's pop entertainment: funnier, more violent, more spectacular, and with female characters far stronger than one might expect. This rigorously researched book fills huge gaps in dance history and is bound to be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and devotees of ballet and the arts.

Download or read book The Art of Ballets Russes written by Exhibition Design, Dance and Music of the Ballets Russes 1909 - 1929 (1997 - 1998, Hartford, Conn. u.a.) and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Præsentation af en række balletter illustreret med fotografier og tegninger af kostumer og kulisser, ordnet alfabetisk efter designeren

Download or read book The Ballet Lover s Companion written by Zoe Anderson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-29 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging book is a welcome guide to the most successful and loved ballets seen on the stage today. Dance writer and critic Zoe Anderson focuses on 140 ballets, a core international repertory that encompasses works from the ethereal world of romantic ballet to the edgy, muscular works of modern choreographers. She provides a wealth of facts and insights, including information familiar only to dance world insiders, and considers such recent works as Alexei Ramansky's Shostakovich Trilogy and Christopher Wheeldon's The Winter's Tale as well as older ballets once forgotten but now returned to the repertory, such as Sylvia. To enhance enjoyment of each ballet, Anderson also offers tips on what to look for during a performance. Each chapter introduces a period of ballet history and provides an overview of innovations and advancement in the art form. In the individual entries that follow, Anderson includes essential facts about each ballet’s themes, plot, composers, choreographers, dance style, and music. The author also addresses the circumstances of each ballet’s creation and its effect in the theater, and she recounts anecdotes that illuminate performance history and reception. Reliable, accessible, and fully up to date, this book will delight anyone who attends the ballet, participates in ballet, or simply loves ballet and wants to know much more about it.

Download or read book The Ballets Russes and Its World written by Lynn Garafola and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dance, art, music, and cultural worlds of the Ballets Russes--a dance company which helped define the avant-garde in the early part of this century--are surveyed in this book, which begins with Serge Diaghilev's influence. 200+ illustrations.

Download or read book Paquita Ballet Pantomime in Two Acts Grand Pas Classique by Marius Petipa and Nuit et Jour Allegorical Ballet in One Act by Marius Petpa Piano Score by Ludwig Minkus written by Robert Ignatius Letellier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-03-08 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two ballets in this volume, Paquita and Nuit et Jour, represent Ludwig Minkus (1826–1917) towards the end of his career in Russia, working at the peak of his creative powers. They are respectively the thirteenth and fourteenth collaborations between the Viennese composer and the famous choreographer of the Russian classical ballet, Marius Petipa (1819–1910). The Grand Pas, written for Petipa's revival of Deldevez’s Paquita in St Petersburg in 1881, is well-known and loved, a jewel of the classical ballet repertoire in its own right. As an independent, abstract divertissement, the Grand Pas has remained popular with ballet companies and their audiences all over the world, but had not been seen outside Russia in its original context (as the climax of the concluding celebrations) before Pierre Lacotte's sensitive re-creation of the 1846 ballet in its entirety at the Paris Opéra in 2001. The Grand Pas was designed for ballerina, premier danseur, six premières danseuses and eight second soloists. Over the years, this Spanish flavoured piece has become a kind of miniature gala performance, with an array of solo variations that are particularly interesting not only for their choreography but also their occasional obbligato writing. Minkus had a talent in composing for the violin, his own special instrument—as can be seen in the sumptuous, extended adagio. His ballets also contain effective virtuoso pieces for the flute, harp, cello and cornet. The violin and harp solos were written with the talents of the famous violinist Leopold Auer and harpist Albert Zabel in mind, both of whom served as instrumental leaders in the St Petersburg theatre orchestras in the late 19th century. The contemporary manuscript piano arrangements reproduced here, repetiteur scores from the Soviet era, present a longer and a shorter version of the Grand Pas. They reflect the performing edition as it has variously evolved over the 130 years of its independent stage life on the Russian stages, and—through the agency of Anna Pavlova’s travelling company in the 1920s—as also adapted by ballet companies across the world. The less familiar Nuit et Jour was created by Petipa and Minkus to mark the accession to the throne of Tsar Alexander III in 1883. It is an interesting development of the popular contemporary genre of abstract allegorical works, illustrating the movement of time through the day and the seasons of the year. The ballet depicts the innate beauties of both night and day (created by the great ballerinas Yevgeniya Sokolova and Yekaterina Vazem respectively), the daily struggle between darkness and light, and climaxes in an achievement of harmony in a dance of the nations. This is given a patriotic resonance by reflecting ten national types from the Russian Empire in a tour de force, testing the composer’s skill in capturing the various national styles: Uzbek, Tartar, Siberian, Finnish, Cossack, Belarusian, Polish, Caucasian, and Ukrainian. The score reproduced here is the piano version published in both Hamburg and St Petersburg about 1885.

Download or read book The great history of Russian ballet written by Evdokia Belova and published by Parkstone International. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the techniques of classical ballets were invented by French and Italian masters two hundred years ago, the Russian Ballet refined these techniques, thus enhancing its already superb performances. This book uncovers the Great History of Russian Ballet, its art and choreography.

Download or read book All Music Guide to Classical Music written by Chris Woodstra and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2005 with total page 1620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering comprehensive coverage of classical music, this guide surveys more than eleven thousand albums and presents biographies of five hundred composers and eight hundred performers, as well as twenty-three essays on forms, eras, and genres of classical music. Original.

Download or read book Eight Female Classical Ballet Variations written by Nina Danilova and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the graceful flutter of Princess Florine at Sleeping Beauty's wedding to the playful jetées in the first act of Giselle, the variation - or short solo work - is one of the key elements of classical ballet. Arguing that true artistry requires in-depth knowledge, author Nina Danilova has worked with students for many years to focus on performing individual variations with the greatest extent of technical proficiency and artistic sensitivity. Eight Female Classical Ballet Variations lays out eight variations in the ballerina's repertoire. Each chapter is divided into five sections: a piano reduction of the score; a contextual note covering the history of the ballet, the plot, and memorable dancers who have performed the role; and instructions for dancing the variation itself, illustrated step by step. Accompanied by a comprehensive companion website, Eight Female Classical Ballet Variations pairs Danilova's method of teaching students with her decades of pedagogical experience.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Russian Music written by Daniel Jaffé and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian music today has a firm hold around the world in the repertoire of opera houses, ballet companies, and orchestras. The music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergey Rachmaninov, Sergey Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich is very much today’s lingua franca both in the concert hall and on the soundtracks of international blockbusters from Hollywood. Meanwhile, the innovations of Modest Musorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Igor Stravinsky have played their crucial role in the development of Western music, influencing the work of virtually every notable composer of the past century. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries for each of Russia’s major performing organizations and performance venues, and on specific genres such as ballet, film music, symphony and church music. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian Music.

Download or read book Ballet Music written by Matthew Naughtin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musicians who work professionally with ballet and dance companies sometimes wonder if they haven’t entered a foreign country—a place where the language and customs seem so utterly familiar and so bafflingly strange at the same. To someone without a dance background, phrases and terms--boy’s variation, pas d’action, apothéose—simply don’t fit their standard musical vocabulary. Even a familiar term like adagio means something quite different in the world of dance. Like any working professional, those conductors, composers, rehearsal pianists, instrumentalists and even music librarians working with professional ballet and dance companies must learn what dance professionals talk about when they talk about music. In Ballet Music: A Handbook Matthew Naughtin provides a practical guide for the professional musician who works with ballet companies, whether as a full-time staff member or as an independent contractor. In this comprehensive work, he addresses the daily routine of the modern ballet company, outlines the respective roles of the conductor, company pianist and music librarian and their necessary collaboration with choreographers and ballet masters, and examines the complete process of putting a dance performance on stage, from selection or existing music to commissioning original scores to staging the final production. Because ballet companies routinely revise the great ballets to fit the needs of their staff and stage, audience and orchestra, ballet repertoire is a tangled web for the uninitiated. At the core of Ballet Music: A Handbook lies an extensive listing of classic ballets in the standard repertoire, with information on their history, versions, revisions, instrumentation, score publishers and other sources for tracking down both the original music and subsequent musical additions and adaptations. Ballet Music: A Handbook is an invaluable resource for conductors, pianists and music librarians as well as any student, scholar or fan of the ballet interested in the complex machinery that works backstage before the curtain goes up.

Download or read book The Ballets of Maurice Ravel written by Deborah Mawer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Ravel, as composer and scenario writer, collaborated with some of the greatest ballet directors, choreographers, designers and dancers of his time, including Diaghilev, Ida Rubinstein, Benois and Nijinsky. In this book, the first study dedicated to Ravel's ballets, Deborah Mawer explores these relationships and argues that ballet music should not be regarded in isolation from its associated arts. Indeed, Ravel's views on ballet and other stage works privilege a synthesized aesthetic. The first chapter establishes a historical and critical context for Ravel's scores, engaging en route with multimedia theory. Six main ballets from Daphnis et Chlo hrough to Bol are considered holistically alongside themes such as childhood fantasy, waltzing and neoclassicism. Each work is examined in terms of its evolution, premiere, critical reception and reinterpretation through to the present; new findings result from primary-source research, undertaken especially in Paris. The final chapter discusses the reasons for Ravel's collaborations and the strengths and weaknesses of his interpersonal relations. Mawer emphasizes the importance of the performative dimension in realizing Ravel's achievement, and proposes that the composer's large-scale oeuvre can, in a sense, be viewed as a balletic undertaking. In so doing, this book adds significantly to current research interest in artistic production and interplay in early twentieth-century Paris.

Download or read book Minor Ballet Composers written by Bruce R. Schueneman and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents biographical sketches of 66 underappreciated ballet composers of the 19th and 20th centuries, plus briefer entries on 20 choreographers, and an introductory overview of the history of ballet. Entries encompass composers' contributions to ballet music as well as other aspects of their lives, and include plot summaries and excerpts from reviews of ballets. For ballet aficionados, music librarians, and musicians. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Dance and Costumes written by Elna Matamoros and published by Alexander Verlag Berlin. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subTexte series of the IPF-Institute for the Performing Arts and Film, is dedicated to presenting original research within two fields of inquiry: Performative Practice and Film. The series offers a platform for the publication of texts, images, or digital media emerging from research on, for, or through the performative arts or film. The series contributes to promoting practice-based art research beyond the ephemeral event and the isolated monograph, to reporting intermediate research findings, and to opening up comparative perspectives. www.zhdk.ch/forschung/ipf

Download or read book 101 Stories of the Great Ballets written by George Balanchine and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1975-05-20 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authored by one of the ballet's most respected experts, this volume includes scene-by-scene retellings of the most popular classic and contemporary ballets, as performed by the world's leading dance companies. Certain to delight long-time fans as well as those just discovering the beauty and drama of ballet.

Download or read book Stravinsky written by Stephen Walsh and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely regarded the greatest composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky was central to the development of modernism in art. Deeply influential and wonderfully productive, he is remembered for dozens of masterworks, from The Firebird and The Rite of Spring to The Rake's Progress, but no dependable biography of him exists. Previous studies have relied too heavily on his own unreliable memoirs and conversations, and until now no biographer has possessed both the musical knowledge to evaluate his art and the linguistic proficiency needed to explore the documentary background of his life--a life whose span extended from tsarist Russia to Switzerland, France, and ultimately the United States. In this revealing volume, the first of two, Stephen Walsh follows Stravinsky from his birth in 1882 to 1934. He traces the composer's early Russian years in new and fascinating detail, laying bare the complicated relationships within his family and showing how he first displayed his extraordinary talents within the provincial musical circle around his teacher, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky's brilliantly creative involvement with the Ballets Russes is illuminated by a sharp sense of the internal artistic politics that animated the group. Portraying Stravinsky's circumstances as an émigré in France trying to make his living as a conductor and pianist as well as a composer while beset by emotional and financial demands, Walsh reveals the true roots of his notorious obsession with money during the 1920s and describes with sympathy the nature of his long affair with Vera Sudeykina. While always respecting Stravinsky's own insistence that life and art be kept distinct, Stravinsky makes clear precisely how the development of his music was connected to his life and to the intellectual environment in which he found himself. But at the same time it demonstrates the composer's remarkably pragmatic psychology, which led him to consider the welfare of his art to be of paramount importance, before which everything else had to give way. Hence, for example, his questionable attitude toward Hitler and Mussolini, and his reputation as a touchy, unpredictable man as famous for his enmities as for his friendships. Stephen Walsh, long established as an expert on Stravinsky's music, has drawn upon a vast array of material, much of it unpublished or unavailable in English, to bring the man himself, in all his color and genius, to glowing life. Written with elegance and energy, comprehensive, balanced, and original, Stravinsky is essential reading for anyone interested in the adventure of art in our time. Praise from the British press for Stephen Walsh's The Music of Stravinsky "One of the finest general studies of the composer." --Wilfrid Mellers, composer, Times Literary Supplement "The beautiful prose of The Music of Stravinsky is itself a fund of arresting images. For those who already love Stravinsky's music, Walsh's essays on each work will bring a smile of recognition and joy at new kernels of insight. For those unfamiliar with many of the works he discusses, Walsh's commentaries are likely to whet appetites for performances of the works." --John Shepherd, Notes "This book sent me scurrying back to the scores and made me want to recommend it to other people. Above all, it is a good read." --Anthony Pople, Music and Letters