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Silver Feet – San Francisco Ballet School Click here to watch Ballet is a cruel sport. Of the thousands of little girls (and some boys) who love their Saturday morning classes, learning to be a fairy or a butterfly is all they need or want. With luck, some will also learn grace and discipline along with the fun. Most move on to other interests - school and boys and ponies – and ballet fades into a pleasant memory of their childhood. But not for all. Many catch the bug, for some it is an obsession, a belief that they can become a ballerina. I was one of those little girls and I remember the absolute conviction that if I tried hard enough I would one day float across the stage of Covent Garden on the tips of my toes in a white tutu. There were lots of us, children who took it seriously, who went to ballet classes after and before school, who nagged for shoes and practice clothes, who practiced at home, at school, in the street, in the studio, who tried out for every children’s chorus and who carried into their teenage years the determination to succeed in what we already knew was a difficult place to break into. Some of us got weeded out early. We were too fat, too tall, too ungainly, too untalented, too something which the teachers knew from the start would disqulify us, and they told us or our parents not to waste our time and their money. We were the lucky ones. There are many of the other kind of teachers who go on encouraging unsuitable students to continue into almost inevitable heartbreak. The kids who get through this stage are, by this time, 14 or 15. If their determination, and their parents’ money, holds up, the next major step is to be accepted at a school attached to a major ballet company – The Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet or one of the others (there are very few) – as only with that kind of advanced training can a talented youngster hope to succeed in this competitive world and become a professional ballet dancer. This is a heartwarming and heartbreaking documentary following three young ballet students as they confront the next big hurdle in their careers, trying out for the School of the San Francisco Ballet. Original Shakespeare – Globe Theatre Click here to watch I find this short film from Shakespeare’s Globe, made for the Open University, utterly rivetting. Two experts, David and Ben Crystal, father and son, walk us through what they call OP, Original Pronounciation, the way Shakespeare’s plays would have sounded in his own day. They show how, by updating his language to our own time, what we call RP, Received Pronounciation, so many of Shakespeare’s jokes are lost and how, by using his own dialect, so much of his meaning is illuminated. Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1 - András Schiff Click here for tickets Back to basics. If, that is, one can describe Beethoven’s dramatic Piano Concerto No.1 in C major, Op. 15, as basic. Here is a monumental performance, filmed in black and white, of Sir András Schiff performing it with The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Talking of Shakespeare, as we were, I came across a comment that Schiff made about this work. He describes this 1795 Concerto as “absolutely huge in its concept for that time. I've always thought that there's something Shakespearean about Beethoven in the way comedy, tragedy, drama, and tenderness are all present at the same time.” Filmed in black and white, this concert is a captivating, historically informed, performance to wallow in, a showcase of craftsmanship and musicality. Schiff, conducting from the piano, sits at a stunning period-accurate recreation of a historic 1822 fortepiano crafted by Conrad Graf. Manet/Degas – Met Museum Click here to watch Stephan Wolohojian and Ashley Dunn, co-curators of the Met’s latest exhibition, a co-production between the Met in New York and Musee d’Orsay in Paris, take us on a tour highlighting the individual work and relationship of two of the greatest impressionist artists, Eduard Manet and Edgar Degas, and the connections, personal and professional, between them. These two Parisian artists were close friends. Both fiercely ambitious and competitive, what they learned from each other informed their paintings in ways that are immediately obvious in comparisons of the works in this exhibition. They copied, they compared, they pushed, they competed, they stole ideas from one another and each was refreshed and stimulated into increasingly unusual and revolutionary experiments in painting. Often they chose the same subjects, contemporary life in Paris, the friends, homelife, and places of entertainment around them. Their relationship continued even after Manet died in April 1883, as his influence on Degas’ paintings is clear from the more than 30 years remaining of his life until his own death in September 1917. They shared an exciting and febrile moment in art history, the middle of the 19th century, when everything was changing and those changes are reflected in their individual contributions but one without the other wouldn’t have had anything like the same impact on the art world, either in their own time or subsequently, in ours. In playing a huge shared role in inventing modernism, theirs was a relationship that pushed the history of art forward.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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