Thank you, Sal, for describing so well what I felt last night! I wholeheartedly agree with your descriptions of Vishneva and Gomes!
Well, I'm going to be brutally honest and say that for me, Ferri/Bolle lacked the magic that I felt last night. Perhaps if I had not seen Vishneva/Gomes, I'd have felt more moved by tonight's show, but alas, that was not the case. Yes, of course, Ferri is 54, so she can't throw herself at Bolle with the same force and abandon that Vishneva can, but it was also her characterization that weakened the story for me.
First, I felt like her Act I Tatiana read too much like her Juliet. She reacted sort of skittishly to meeting Onegin the same way Juliet reacts to meeting Paris, and it was not so obvious to me that she had fallen madly in love with him. On the whole, she seemed rather calm prior to the bedroom scene. In contrast, meeting Onegin was a life-shattering event for Vishneva's Tatiana. But this also has to do with how …show more content…
And that's what I like to see in "Onegin."
As for the rest of the dancers: I liked Lane and Simkin separately as Olga and Lensky, but they had some problems with the tricky supported pirouettes in their Act I p.d.d.; Lane had to come off pointe once, and the second one definitely looked labored.
One quibble about the corps: tonight when the girls did the supported grand jetes down the diagonal, they were completely out of synch and it looked very messy.
And one last word about the costumes: one of my friends who came last night and was sitting in the back of the orchestra complained that Tatiana's red dress in Act III blended in too much with the red background at the ball, and she had trouble seeing her. She also felt that it was sometimes hard to see Tatiana/Onegin in their dark costumes in the final bedroom
Well, I'm going to be brutally honest and say that for me, Ferri/Bolle lacked the magic that I felt last night. Perhaps if I had not seen Vishneva/Gomes, I'd have felt more moved by tonight's show, but alas, that was not the case. Yes, of course, Ferri is 54, so she can't throw herself at Bolle with the same force and abandon that Vishneva can, but it was also her characterization that weakened the story for me.
First, I felt like her Act I Tatiana read too much like her Juliet. She reacted sort of skittishly to meeting Onegin the same way Juliet reacts to meeting Paris, and it was not so obvious to me that she had fallen madly in love with him. On the whole, she seemed rather calm prior to the bedroom scene. In contrast, meeting Onegin was a life-shattering event for Vishneva's Tatiana. But this also has to do with how …show more content…
And that's what I like to see in "Onegin."
As for the rest of the dancers: I liked Lane and Simkin separately as Olga and Lensky, but they had some problems with the tricky supported pirouettes in their Act I p.d.d.; Lane had to come off pointe once, and the second one definitely looked labored.
One quibble about the corps: tonight when the girls did the supported grand jetes down the diagonal, they were completely out of synch and it looked very messy.
And one last word about the costumes: one of my friends who came last night and was sitting in the back of the orchestra complained that Tatiana's red dress in Act III blended in too much with the red background at the ball, and she had trouble seeing her. She also felt that it was sometimes hard to see Tatiana/Onegin in their dark costumes in the final bedroom