Boosey & Hawkes

Kats-Chernin's Wild Swans ballet for Sydney

(April 2003)

Following their successful Deep Sea Dreaming collaboration for the Olympics opening ceremony, Meryl Tankard has invited Elena Kats-Chernin to write the music for Australian Ballet’s new full-length Wild Swans, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale which has inspired both artsits’ imaginations since childhood. The ballet opens at the Sydney Opera House on 29 April with performances running through to 16 May, followed by a visit to Melbourne (6-17 June).

Elena Kats-Chernin describes her creative collaboration with Meryl Tankard in her programme note for the Wild Swans programme:

"From our first collaboration on the Deep Sea Dreaming segment of the Olympics Opening Ceremony in 2000, it was clear that Meryl Tankard and I had a rare level of mutual understanding and we were very interested in working together again. As we were discussing various ideas, we found out that we both were fascinated by the same Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale and it became clear that this was to be our project, and from that day on we collaborated very closely. We met regularly around my piano, about twice a week and went through everything scene by scene. Meryl would work out the structure and describe the images in her head, and I would improvise all kinds of different versions, and at some point Meryl would say - "yes, that's it" - and then I would write everything down. In a couple of days she would visit again and we would check the past material as well as try and work on the next scenes. It was good to work in the "running order", as this way we kept the rhythm of the whole piece in "real time".

"We were also lucky that the Australian Ballet arranged for a draft recording of the whole ballet with the Orchestra of Victoria. That way Meryl had a chance to hear all the orchestral colours that I had imagined and which were sometimes very hard to describe in words. Meryl and the dancers then rehearsed with the recording and in the last week of that phase I joined inand we found ourselves working out the final order of which pieces worked and where.

"The big difference between writing this ballet score and for example writing for the concert hall, is that the music has to tell a story, as well as being "danceable". It also needs to be able to set the mood for each scene and help establish connections between scenes and characters.

"For me, the optimal way of working on any project is together with other artists, and blending their ideas with mine and vice versa. It is lucky that for fun I love improvising on the piano and the most inspiring moments in the process were as I improvised with Meryl to the movements of the dancers.

"We also had the privilege of working with the evocative projected images of Regis Lansac which became the basis for two of the scenes.

"Early on, Meryl and I agreed that we definitely would like to add a soprano to the orchestra that would represent the princess Eliza and add a slightly magical quality to the sound of the orchestra. She also ended up becoming a character on stage in the role of the "good fairy". The sequences with the soprano are amongst those that I feel the most attached to, and have helped give the ballet score an unusual and unique sound.

"Being Russian born I have a strong connection to the ballet scores of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, and as a result in the Wild Swans, more than in any other work of mine, I allowed myself the freedom to roam through 200 years of musical genres, ranging from Hungarian Operetta through folk music and even including the influences of jazz and popular music."

Dances, Preludes and Rags

Last year brought Philip Taylor’s new ballet A(t)tempting Beauty for Ballet Theatre Munich, employing the composer’s first piano concerto Displaced Dances, movements from Clocks and her Purple Prelude. This followed Taylor’s choreography of Concertino and his new ballet for Munich in April will include movements from her Sonata Lost and Found. Meryl Tankard used the same miniature sonata together with Purple Prelude in both its piano and ensemble incarnations for her recent ballet Merryland for Nederlands Dans Theater, which toured internationally in 2002 to Switzerland and Sweden. Purple Prelude also featured last year in Daniele Kurz’s new ballet Schere Stein Papier for Stuttgart Ballet.

Also visit our Dance Website.

Boosey & Hawkes has recently published Book of Rags for piano by Kats-Chernin, offering a miniature view of this Uzbek-born, much travelled, and now Australian-resident composer. The book assembles 12 Rags written over a five-year period between 1995 and 1999, often as light relief and antidote to the pressures of composing her large-scale serious works. They are intimate in tone, seemingly mingling pain and joy, crossing-over between jazz and the traditions of Russian piano music. Four of the rags were written for Ian Munro, who now has the complete set in his repertoire. Munro was soloist in the premiere performances of the composer’s Piano Concerto No.2 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

> Weitere Informationen zur Aufführung: Wild Swans
> Weitere Informationen zum Werk: Wild Swans
> Weitere Informationen zu Book of Rags

Photo: Felicia Palanca in Wild Swans. Image © Jeff Busby & Régis Lansac

> Nachrichtensuche

Melden Sie sich an für Updates und Angebote per E-Mail

ZUR REGISTRIERUNG

CANDIDE -

Wiederaufnahme von Leonard Bernsteins musikalischer Farce an der Staatsoperette Dresden (ab 4. Nov.). Studienpartitur und Klavierauszug des Werkes sind im Handel erhältlich.

LESEN SIE MEHR

Orchester- und Bühnenwerke