If only Gerard Hoffnung had been with us at the ballet the other night. My pal and I were having a girly night out treating ourselves to the Royal Ballet's gorgeous production of The Sleeping Beauty, starring Tamara Rojo. We were in seventh heaven, a.k.a. the amphitheatre at Covent Garden, finishing the interval after the hundred-year sleep and waiting for Prince Florimund - who bore an astonishing resemblance to Mr Darcy - to appear in the middle of the 18th century and wake up the rock-toed daughter of King Florestan The Fourteenth with a good snog. But he has to go hunting first, and the hunting horns are the first thing Tchaikovsky gives us in Act II. The lights are down, the conductor Valeriy Ovsyanikov is ready on the podium, and...
...silence. Followed by a few gentle rustles. Nobody seemed quite sure what was happening.
Then came the tell-tale shuffles at the back of the pit as the missing players slunk on. Dear reader, unless I am very much mistaken, it was the horn section!
We were sitting too high up to see their faces clearly, but I reckon Hoffnung could have done a good job at imagining them... He could also have conjured exquisitely the expressions of the trumpet players who had to echo the fanfares but sounded suspiciously as if they were laughing as hard as I was.
I do love The Sleeping Beauty. The idea that the missing of one name from an invitation list can spark world-changing events. The sheer sadism of the choreography - Marius Petipa must have been an ogre. The way that Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat don't even consider killing Mr & Mrs Bluebird in the final act. The way that all those fairies bestow upon Princess Aurora the gifts of song, wisdom, beauty, gentleness, etc, yet the thing she seems to do best when she grows up is to balance in 'attitude' on one toe for a very, very long time (see pic). At least she meets Mr Darcy in the end. And Tamara Rojo and Federico Bonelli are a glorious pair, totally in harmony - they look made for each other.
Minor production quibbles from a ballet nut: if they kept Ashton's solo for the prince, choreographed for Anthony Dowell, why did they jettison his Garland Dance? The new one by Christopher Wheeldon sticks out like a sore thumb. Lots of cuts to the music, as if fast-forwarding through the dramatic scenes - and only the briefest gesture at the hunting party, not even a Farandole. One notes that the show finishes bang on 10.30.
Still, it looks great - the designs by Oliver Messel have been reconstructed from the 1940s classic production that shot Fonteyn to stardom - and the dancing is simply astonishing.
The horns, when they were there, played jolly well, as did the rest of the orchestra, and Sergei Levitin worked magic with the violin solos.
