Hi, My Dad is after a DVD of Swan Lake - does anyone know of a good one? Cheers, Martin
Two Swan Lake dvd's I would recommend are the Royal Ballet with ex-Kirov dancer Natalia Makarova and Anthony Dowell. It's from 1980. The corps "folk" dances are a bit bland, as ever with the Royal Ballet, but there's a lot of good dancing and music in it, and the story's arc is well observed. The other one is the Bolshoi with Maya Plisetskaya, a live perfomance from 1957. Bigger and bolder, and the corps work is much more vigorous.
Cheers Herman, I'll pass that on. I expect he'll go for the first one you mentioned as he'll probably view a 1957 recording rather old. Martin
If you want something a bit different, you could always try the Matthew Bourne version, e.g. at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004CWO8/103-5912315-7264630. This is the one with male principal swans and corps de ballet. I'm not a big ballet fan and have not seen any more than the odd clip, so can't comment on it myself. Seems to be one you either love or hate...no middle ground.
But why would you want "something different" when you don't even have that much familiarity with the real thing? It's like recommending a piano version of Beethoven 5 as a first recording. Besides, all classical Swan Lake are already bewilderingly different in crucial details, because of the somewhat fraught history of this choreography. Happy ending, sad ending; mime, no mime; white swan / black swan same girl, different girls etc etc. Swan Lake is about feminine vulnerability and beauty, and, in fact, about man's vulnerability towards both issues. Prince Siegfried, if anything, does not understand what his love the white swan is about, which is why he fatally mistakes her for the black swan. If his object of desire however is a guy, just like himself, the mystery around which the whole story revolves is gone.
So it seems you're in the 2nd camp then Herman . I should have made it clearer that I wasn't recommending it, but just that it may be one to think about. Personally, while I like watching excellent dancers, I've always found women in tutus a complete turn-off (much prefer them without the tutus ), so gravitate towards the more modern (even abstract) productions. The most enjoyable evening I ever had at the ballet - not that that's many - was a completely abstract ballet made out of the Grosse Fugue.
Oh, tutus are obviously a totally bizarre invention, especially if you have the "flat" Russian ones* that sit like this on the body -II- and only serve to expose the fanny in a weird way. One of the great things Balanchine did was make all these leotard ballets, where the girls just wear a flimsy skirt or not even that. The downside of course was that the typical Balanchine woman is even thinner than the 'classical' dancer was. *In fact in this Royal Ballet Swan Lake I recommended there's the two girls in the Act III pas de quatre wearing flat tutus.
This is the only version I know. I liked it, and I'm not normally a ballet fan. I'm sure Herman's views are much more informed than mine.
