update to Ballet magazine article

The following is taken from another article I wrote for the March issue of Dance Review, replying to various letters the magazine had received.

Interesting reaction to my comments on tempi in ballet. Having lingered over the adjective “dishy” used in the description of me by Patricia Williams in her January issue letter, I suppose my main point generally was that one art form should not be at the expense of another and I believe that that is what can happen in ballet. I parted company with Richard Honner’s otherwise excellent arguments in his letter of February, when he said that I forget at my peril that ballet, for its audience, is first and foremost a visual art form. I don’t think it need be or indeed should be, as one could not do without the other, and I firmly believe that ballet audiences would get far greater satisfaction out of a performance if the music was as wonderful as the dancing and treated by all choreographers and dancers as equal. Is opera a visual art form or an aural one? Are West End musicals visual or aural? Is Shakespeare? The answer is of course, they are all both. Neither one dominates the other in any of those art forms, why can’t ballet be the same? Or is that the problem? Is it conceived by audiences, dancers, management and choreographers as mainly a visual art form? I personally think that’s a mistake and there should be just as much artistic magic and technical accomplishment going on in the pit as on the stage. As Patricia wrote, and I’m sorry to refer to Patricia’s letter again but she is obviously a person of extremely discerning taste, if the technical brilliance of modern day dancers makes the re-creation of original 19th century choreography difficult to execute, then may I suggest it is performed as originally intended with the limitations that implies upon the dancers, or create modern choreography to go with the original music. Do one or the other but not a mixture of both! I have no aversion to variations of tempi that are different to how I personally imagine them to be, but my aim as a conductor is to re-create the music I am conducting how I imagine the composer originally intended it to be heard. But it is only my execution of the composer’s intentions that makes my performance different from another’s. Tempo markings with slight variations however are fairly universal and accepted and should not be interfered with. It is therefore the extremes of tempi and interpretation I cannot tolerate, which is where I disagree with Colin Ede. I was never able to accept Bernstein’s liberal reading of a composer’s explicit markings. My understanding is that he never liked it when it was perpetrated in reverse! Colin Ede may like Bernstein’s Nimrod but I’m fairly certain Edward Elgar would not! Whether that matters is I guess partly what this discussion is all about. Is it Bernstein’s Nimrod or Elgar’s? For me, when a passage is marked Allegro and it is performed Andante, or as in the case of the White Swan solo I quoted, Andante taken Molto Adagio due to the whim of a ballerina’s attitude (in every sense of the word), it makes no sense. Collaboration between performers is the key here, not dominance of one over the other. And far from Mr. Tchaikovsky being pleased his lovely music was being played by ballet companies throughout the world as Robert Harrold in the January issue imagines, I think the composer would be tearing his hair out with frustration, because sometimes to me, and very probably would have been to him, I think his wonderful music is almost unrecognisable!