Tag Archives: Roberta Marquez

Royal Ballet Triple: Afternoon of a Faun/ In the Night/ Song of the Earth, ROH, Covent Garden, May 2015

The Royal Ballet’s season finale at Covent Garden appears as the Company prepares for its American tour, which starts with Acosta’s Don Quixote in Washington and Chicago before moving to New York with two mixed bills, one including Song of the Earth. The casts for Song in London were similar to those planned for New …

Read more >


Royal Ballet Triple: The Dream/ Connectome/ The Concert, May 2014

The clever mockery in the first and third items in this excellent triple bill contrasted well with the brilliant new ballet by Alastair Marriott that lay between them. Connectome is named after a scientific term referring to the neural connections of a brain — in other words its ‘wiring diagram’ — and though only that …

Read more >


Jewels, Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, December 2013

The high point of this first evening was the big pas-de-deux for Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares in Diamonds, in which she brought a fairy tale quality to this abstract yet sublimely romantic third section of Balanchine’s Jewels. The music is from Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony, his last composition before Swan Lake, and the ballerina exhibits …

Read more >


Firebird/ In the Night/ Raymonda Act III, Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, December 2012

What a terrific triple bill this is, and on the evening of 29 December it was beautifully danced. Among cast changes in Raymonda, Zenaida Yanowsky and Ryoichi Hirano replaced Nuñez and Pennefather in the main roles, and Ricardo Cervera replaced Whitehead in the Hungarian dance. Cervera showed a fine cutting edge and dramatic sense, and his …

Read more >


La Fille mal gardée, with McRae and Marquez, Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, May 2012

La Fille mal gardée is one of Frederick Ashton’s most delightful ballets, and this review covers the same cast as for the live cinema relay on May 16. The story is simple. Widow Simone wants to marry off her very pretty daughter Lise to the son of a wealthy landowner, thereby assuring her and her daughter’s financial future. There are …

Read more >


The Dream with Marquez and McRae, Song of the Earth with Watson, Benjamin and Hristov, Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, February 2012

When Frederick Ashton choreographed Dream in 1964 to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, he created a magical evocation of the play with Oberon and Titania danced by a very young Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, and every time I see this ballet I recall Dowell’s performances. But Steven McRae rose to the challenge of this fiendishly …

Read more >


Royal Ballet Triple: Asphodel Meadows, Enigma Variations, Gloria, Covent Garden, November 2011

The first and last items on this excellent programme are to music by Poulenc, and both these two ballets — though not the music — deal with death. In an announcement at the start of the evening, a request was made for no applause during Gloria. As a result the audience seemed hesitant about applauding the …

Read more >