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La Fin Du Jour (ballet)
''La Fin du jour'' is a one-act ballet created by Kenneth MacMillan in 1979 for the Royal Ballet, London. The music is Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G (1931). In MacMillan's words, "''La Fin du jour'' draws its inspiration from the style of the 'thirties'; the designs and choreography are inspired by the fashion plates of an era and a way of life shattered forever by the Second World War." The first performance was at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 15 March 1979. The leading roles were danced by Merle Park, Jennifer Penney, Julian Hosking and Wayne Eagling Wayne Eagling (born 27 November 1950) is a Canadian ballet dancer, now retired. After more than twenty years as a popular member of The Royal Ballet in London, he became well known as an international choreographer and company director. Early li .... The solo pianist was Philip Gammon, the conductor was Ashley Lawrence, and the designs were by Ian Spurling. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kenneth MacMillan
Sir Kenneth MacMillan (11 December 192929 October 1992) was a British ballet dancer and choreographer who was artistic director of the Royal Ballet in London between 1970 and 1977, and its principal choreographer from 1977 until his death. Earlier he had served as director of ballet for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He was also associate director of the American Ballet Theatre from 1984 to 1989, and artistic associate of the Houston Ballet from 1989 to 1992. From a family with no background of ballet or music, MacMillan was determined from an early age to become a dancer. The director of Sadler's Wells Ballet, Ninette de Valois, accepted him as a student and then a member of her company. In the late 1940s, MacMillan built a successful career as a dancer, but, plagued by stage fright, he abandoned it while still in his twenties. After this he worked entirely as a choreographer; he created ten full-length ballets and more than fifty one-act pieces. In addition to his work for bal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Ballet
The Royal Ballet is a British internationally renowned classical ballet company, based at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, England. The largest of the five major ballet companies in Great Britain, the Royal Ballet was founded in 1931 by Dame Ninette de Valois. It became the resident ballet company of the Royal Opera House in 1946, and has purpose-built facilities within these premises. It was granted a royal charter in 1956, becoming recognised as Britain's flagship ballet company. The Royal Ballet was one of the foremost ballet companies of the 20th century, and continues to be one of the world's most famous ballet companies to this day, generally noted for its artistic and creative values. The company employs approximately 100 dancers. The official associate school of the company is the Royal Ballet School, and it also has a sister company, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, which operates independently. The Prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet is the late Da ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maurice Ravel
Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer. Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, ''Boléro'' (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other compose ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Piano Concerto In G (Ravel)
The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboard, which is a row of keys (small levers) that the performer presses down or strikes with the fingers and thumbs of both hands to cause the hammers to strike the strings. It was invented in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori around the year 1700. Description The word "piano" is a shortened form of ''pianoforte'', the Italian term for the early 1700s versions of the instrument, which in turn derives from ''clavicembalo col piano e forte'' (key cimbalom with quiet and loud)Pollens (1995, 238) and '' fortepiano''. The Italian musical terms ''piano'' and ''forte'' indicate "soft" and "loud" respectively, in this context referring to the variations in volume (i.e., loudness) produced in response to a pianist's touch or pressure on the keys: the gr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House (ROH) is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply Covent Garden, after a previous use of the site. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. The first theatre on the site, the Theatre Royal (1732), served primarily as a playhouse for the first hundred years of its history. In 1734, the first ballet was presented. A year later, the first season of operas, by George Frideric Handel, began. Many of his operas and oratorios were specifically written for Covent Garden and had their premieres there. The current building is the third theatre on the site, following disastrous fires in 1808 and 1856 to previous buildings. The façade, foyer, and auditorium date from 1858, but almost every other element of the present complex dates from an extensive reconstruction in the 1990s. The main auditorium seats 2,256 people, mak ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Merle Park
Dame Merle Park (born 8 October 1937) is a British ballet dancer and teacher, now retired. As a prima ballerina with the Royal Ballet during the 1960s and 1970s, she was known for "brilliance of execution and virtuoso technique" as well as for her ebullience and charm. Also admired for her dramatic abilities, she was praised as an actress who "textured her vivacity with emotional details."Anonymous"Dame Merle Park" online biography, Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing. Retrieved 14 September 2015. Early life and training Born in Salisbury, the capital and most populous city of the self-governing British Crown colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), Merle Park was educated in local schools. As a child she began her dance training with Betty Lamb, a local ballet teacher, and soon showed unusual facility. In 1951, when she was 14, her parents moved the family to England and enrolled her in the Elmhurst School for Dance. Located in Camberley, Surrey, not far from cen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jennifer Penney
Jennifer Penney (born 1946) is a Canadian ballerina and a former principal dancer with the Royal Ballet. Jennifer Penney was born in 1946 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She studied there with Gweneth Lloyd and Betty Farrally, and then at the Royal Ballet School from 1962–63. Penney joined the Royal Ballet in 1963 and became a principal in 1970. Dancing one of the four lead roles in Kenneth MacMillan's 1980 ''Gloria'' for the Royal Ballet, the critic Clement Crisp Clement Andrew Crisp OBE (21 September 1926 – 1 March 2022) was a British dance critic. He served as dance critic for the ''Financial Times'' from 1956 to 2020. Life and career Crisp was born in Romford, Essex, in 1926, although for many years ... wrote of "her beautiful line, her always easy technical command". Penney retired in 1988 and returned to British Columbia. References {{DEFAULTSORT:Penney, Jennifer 1946 births Dancers of The Royal Ballet Canadian ballerinas Living people People from V ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julian Hosking
Julian Hosking (1953-1989) was a British ballet dancer and a former principal dancer with the Royal Ballet. Hosking was born in Cornwall of a Viennese mother and Cornish father. He entered White Lodge aged 11 and progressed to the Royal Ballet School.Biographical note in Royal Opera House programme booklet, 17 November 1984. Joining the company in 1970, he danced a wide range of roles across the Royal Ballet repertoire at Covent Garden from 1971 to 1986. These included leads in Kenneth MacMillan's 1979 '' La Fin du jour'' and his 1980 ''Gloria'' for the Royal Ballet. He became a Principal in 1980. He also danced in the premieres of ''Manon'', ''Four Schumann Pieces'', and ''Consort Lessons'', and the first performances by the Royal Ballet of ''Liebeslieder Walzer'', '' My Brother, My Sisters'' and ''Return to the Strange Land''. In 1983, Hosking danced a lead role in Glen Tetley's ''Dances of Albion: Dark Night Glad Day'', and Anna Kisselgoff writing in the ''New York Times'' calle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wayne Eagling
Wayne Eagling (born 27 November 1950) is a Canadian ballet dancer, now retired. After more than twenty years as a popular member of The Royal Ballet in London, he became well known as an international choreographer and company director. Early life and training Wayne John Eagling was born in Montreal, Quebec, to Anglophone parents, Edward and Thelma Eagling. He spent much of his childhood and youth in California, where his family had moved. As a boy, he augmented his academic studies by attending classes at the Patricia Ramsey Studio of Dance Arts. There, he developed into a gifted student of classical ballet and, as he matured, was encouraged by his teachers to pursue a career as a professional dancer. In 1965, when he was 15, he was noticed by Michael Somes and Gerd Larsen of the Royal Ballet during the company's tour of the United States and was offered a place at the Royal Ballet School in London. He moved to England in the late 1960s, when "swinging London," the vibrant cultur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ashley Lawrence (musician)
Ashley Macdonald Lawrence, (5 June 1934, Hamilton, New Zealand – 7 May 1990, Tokyo) was a New Zealand conductor mainly active in the UK and Germany, and particularly associated with ballet.Goodwin N. Ashley Lawrence. In: ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music''. Macmillan, London, 2001. Career After having graduated from the University of Auckland, Lawrence went to London in 1956 and spent three years at the Royal College of Music studying piano and conducting. He also studied with Rafael Kubelik. In 1962 he joined the Royal Ballet and soon made his debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In September 1966 he became Music Director of the ballet company of the Deutsche Oper in West Berlin, and in 1971 was appointed Music Director of the Stuttgart Ballet. In 1971 he also became Principal Conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra. In 1972 he was appointed as Principal Conductor of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, and in 1973 Music Director of the same company, leaving in 1987. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ballets By Kenneth MacMillan
Sir Kenneth MacMillan (11 December 192929 October 1992) was a British ballet dancer and choreographer who was artistic director of the Royal Ballet in London between 1970 and 1977, and its principal choreographer from 1977 until his death. Earlier he had served as director of ballet for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He was also associate director of the American Ballet Theatre from 1984 to 1989, and artistic associate of the Houston Ballet from 1989 to 1992. From a family with no background of ballet or music, MacMillan was determined from an early age to become a dancer. The director of Sadler's Wells Ballet, Ninette de Valois, accepted him as a student and then a member of her company. In the late 1940s, MacMillan built a successful career as a dancer, but, plagued by stage fright, he abandoned it while still in his twenties. After this he worked entirely as a choreographer; he created ten full-length ballets and more than fifty one-act pieces. In addition to his work for ba ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ballets To The Music Of Maurice Ravel
Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of dance with its own vocabulary. Ballet has been influential globally and has defined the foundational techniques which are used in many other dance genres and cultures. Various schools around the world have incorporated their own cultures. As a result, ballet has evolved in distinct ways. A ''ballet'' as a unified work comprises the choreography and music for a ballet production. Ballets are choreographed and performed by trained ballet dancers. Traditional classical ballets are usually performed with classical music accompaniment and use elaborate costumes and staging, whereas modern ballets are often performed in simple costumes and without elaborate sets or scenery. Etymology Ballet is a French word which had its origin in Italian ''b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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