Robert Tanitch reviews Birmingham Royal Ballet’s double-bill at London Coliseum
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s programme opens with George Balanchine’s neo-classical Serenade.
Inventive, symmetrical, light and buoyant, it is lovely to look at. It’s very girly, too, in that it is a showcase primarily for the female corps. Danced to Tchaikovsky, it is rightly one of the most popular and widely performed of all his works.
Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is based on a bawdy and irreverent Medieval Latin text on the perils of drinking, gluttony and lust.
First performed in 1937 the rousing barbaric choral music sounds very Russian.
It is regularly used in films and adverts and it’s always good for the box office. Sung here by Ex Cathedra, it’s an absolute blast.
David Bintley’s 20-year-old ballet, a modern day morality play, designed by Philip Prowse, observes three frustrated seminarians who discard their clerical collars and abandon the sacred for the profane.
Mathias Dingman is all Boiling Rage and Iain Mackay, Sick with Love, strips to his underpants.
The fickle Goddess Fortuna (Samar Downs) is a hooker in a little black dress and high heels.
She gets the performance off to a good angular start.
The revue-format has some arresting images but the choreographic satire is never as dark and never as erotically sinful as the guilty Catholic subject matter warrants.
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