Music by Felix Mendelssohn; based on the play by William Shakespeare.
This is a review of a recording made by Opus Arte of the ballet A Midsummer Night's Dream choreographed in 1962 by George Balanchine and performed by the Pacific Northwest Ballet with the BBC Concert Orchestra. The show was shot in high-definition video at the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London in February 1999. Opus Arte first published their recording (on June 1, 2001) in DVD format (catalog number: OA 0966 D). But this is a review of the same recording published (on October 1, 2007) by Opus Arte in HD DVD (catalog number: OA HD5003 D) and later (on February 1, 2008) in Blu-ray (catalog number: OA BD7003D).
Titania: Patricia Barker
Oberon: Paul Gibson
Puck: Seth Belliston
Helena: Lisa Apple
Hermia: Julie Tobiason
Lysander: Ross Yearsley
Demetrius: Jeffrey Stanton
Hippolyta: Ariana Lallone
Theseus: Batkhurel Bold
Butterfly: Kaori Nakamura
Titania's Cavalier: Charles Newton
Bottom: Timothy Lynch
Divertissement Pas de Deux: Louise Nadeau and Olivier Wevers
Choreographer: George Balanchine
Conductor--BBC Concert Orchestra: Stewart Kershaw
Leader: Cynthia Fleming
Soprano: Libby Crabtree
Mezzo-soprano: Judith Harris
Artistic Directors: Kent Stowell and Francia Russell
Set and Costume Designer: Martin Pakledinaz
Lighting: Randall G. Chiarelli
Production and Stage Director: Francia Russell
Assistant Production and Stage Directors: Otto Neubert and Anne Dabrowski
Our eyes give us our most detailed source of information about the world. Our ears fill in gaps by warning us of dangers and alerting us to pleasures that cannot be defined by light. But the ear is also the portal to the greatest transport of intelligence of all: the word. The word--that cocklebur of the mind that combines all our senses can tell us with whatever reason adds and then lets us share it with others. The word then is the basis of the most powerful of the arts. And in the realm of performance, the most powerful art form is the theater play.
Among the most popular theater plays is Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, a comedy of romantic love. It's a fantastic conglomerate of interlocking plots with three human couples and the king and queen of the fairies, all garnished with a play within the play about yet another set of lovers from mythology, Pyramus and Thisbe (the original Romeo and Juliet). Such an intricate and complicated work is challenging enough as a play. It would not remotely be possible to portray it in dance and mime. So it is not surprising to learn from Balanchine himself that his main inspiration for the ballet was Mendelssohn's music, not the play.
Still, Balanchine took most of important characters in the ballet right out of the play. The story of lovers working out their problems, having a mass wedding, and throwing a party allowed him to create a part for every dancer in the company from age 4 to 40. Balanchine believed that someone seeing the ballet didn't need to know anything about the play. But I think the characters and their stories would seem pretty strange to anyone who doesn't recognize them from the play. So, for those of you who have never read Shakespeare's play or have not read it the last few days, here a brief refresher course.
The play is set in ancient Athens, and ancient Athens is set in a county region of England in 1594. Duke Theseus, the hero of mythical Athens, and Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, plan to marry in a few days and are looking forward to the entertainment that will follow.
Outside the city there dwells another set of monarchs: the tiny king and queen of the fairies with their retinues of fluttery and creepy creatures. Alas, the fairy king, with the portentous name of Oberon, and his queen, with the ironic name Titania, are feuding (over the possession of an exotic young Indian boy). Oberon's favorite courtier is Puck, the little daemon of tricks, pranks, mishaps, and mistakes.
Next we meet two sets of young lovers: Hermia and Lysander and Helena and Demetrius. Alas, Demetrius has tired of Helena and become enamored of Hermia. This upsets everybody. The obvious solution is for Demetrius to return to Helena.
Finally, there is an completely different and unrelated set of characters: a band of workmen of Athens (the ``rude mechanicals'') who, under the direction of Bottom (Shakespeare's upside-down inside-out alter ego), hope to make some money by presenting a play for the Duke and his new bride at the wedding party.
In his first four acts, Shakespeare contrives to send the human lovers into the same patch of the forest where the fairies live. Also, the rude mechanicals sneak away to the same place to practice their play. Oberon wants to play a trick on Titania. He also feels sorry for lonely Helena and wants to help her. He orders Puck to fetch a magic flower. When this flower is waved in the face of one asleep, then on wakening that person will fall madly in love with the first being he or she sees.
All this traffic at one small intersection leads to series of chain collisions.
Balanchine tells his story in two acts. He collapses all of Shakespeare's first four acts into Act 1 of the ballet, and this comprises Chapters 1 thru 11 on the Opus Arte disc. Act II of the ballet is completely new. Balanchine replaces Shakespeare's play within the play with dancing at the wedding party, and this comprises Chapters 12 thru 17 on the disc.
Here's a description of the Balanchine story as recorded, chapter-by-chapter, on the Opus Arte disc:
This is not a superstar vehicle. It's an ensemble piece that gives great opportunity for many dancers in a company including students at various levels of experience.
There are 14 important roles (the 12 named characters in Act 1 and the two unnamed characters who dance the Divertissement Pas de Deux in Act 2). In addition, by my count this production had in Act 1 no fewer than 66 roles for butterflies, pages, courtiers, bugs, fairies, rustics, and hounds. In Act 2, I counted 46 lesser roles. Of course there will be instances where the same dancer will get several parts, but this productions could involve as many as, say, 126 performers. All these folks, plus a battalion of parents and guardians of minors, flew to England to make this recording. It must have been a memorable event in the careers of everyone involved.
This is such a blithe show--it would be churlish to let heard a discouraging word. Patricia Baker is gloriously unattainable as Titania, Paul Gibson is suavely mysterious as Oberon, and Seth Belliston as Puck is the original hyper-active child. (Apparently Belliston also played Oberon with great distinction on other nights in this same production.) Lisa Apple, Julie Tobiason, Ross Yearsley and Jeffrey Stanton display lithe athleticism and comic chops as the whip-sawn lovers. Ariana Lallone as Hippolyta, resplendent in gold and black, performs her spectacular role with fierce elan. Batkhurel Bold looks a bit young to be the groom of a warrior queen, but he gamely handles his circumstance with pomp. Kaori Nakamura is so cute as Butterfly--is she 14 or 34? Charles Newton is elegant as Titania's Cavalier. And finally Timothy Lynch, with maybe the hardest role of all for a ballet dancer, manages to be charmingly clumsy as Bottom.
Act II opens with the Mendelssohn's Wedding March, probably the second most popular piece of wedding music today in the West. (Number 1 is, of course, Wagner's ``Here Comes the Bride!'' from the opera Lohengrin.) After the march in, many dancers perform a series of figures comprising what is called a Divertissement. This is all done in a grand, sumptuous style befitting the occasion.
Now Shakespeare's theater play is more a celebration than a drama. Many aspects of romantic love are taken up and all problems are resolved. There is no great fall (as in a tragedy) or triumph (as in a history play). There is no climax in the play. But Balanchine manages in his ballet to go beyond the theater play and provide a climax.
I refer now, of course, to Balanchine's Divertissement Pas de Deux in Act 2. This ethereal number, performed by nameless characters dancing in the abstract, totals up in greater sum all that has gone before. The cavalier shows his lady the greatest possible gentleness and respect in his supporting role. The lady suppresses beams of joy for a while to sustain the thrill of anticipation. Together they perform, with flawless grace and purity, figure on figure of mutual trust, admiration. and cooperation--until, after long enough, her passion and delight bursts out and her cavalier, protecting and shielding, accepts her surrender.
If anyone would be named as the stars of Balanchine 1999 Midsummer Night's Dream, then in my view, they would be Louise Nadeau and Olivier Wevers in their rendition of the Divertissement Pas de Deux. This is the most exquisite part of the entire production and is the most beautiful scene that I have yet seen in HDVD presentation.
The Balanchine 1999 Midsummer Night's Dream is in 1080i with 5.1 Dolby TrueHD surround sound.
I reviewed this on my Sony KDL 52'' XBR4 in my small home theater supported by a Toshiba HD-XA2 player, a Denon AVR-888 receiver, and a 5.1 set of KEF Q Series speakers with a Gallo subwoofer. I am happy to report that this is the first fully-satisfactory HDVD title to be published. The first HDVD was the Opus Arte Nureyev Swan Lake. That was a disc of historic significance showing a monumental conception of the Swan Lake ballet. But that Swan Lake was shot, I think, under difficulty conditions in a large space with limited lighting--fine for the eye of the audience but torturous for the camera. The next HDVD title published was the Opus Arte Die Zauberflöte by the Royal Opera House. Shooting that production was a nightmare for the cameramen with its dark design pallette, cavernous spaces, persistent stage smoke, as well as side and rear lighting sometimes even shining directly into the cameras. In contrast, this Opus Arte Midsummer Night's Dream was shot in a relatively small venue. There was ample proper light (even in the night scenes) for the camera crews to get great results.
The Dolby TrueHD surround sound is fresh, lush, clean, and completely convincing. Mendelssohn wrote a short suite for a Midsummer Night's Dream ballet. Balanchine needed more music, so he combed through the rest of Mendelssohn's output and cobbled on 4 more selections. You would think it was all written at one time just for Balanchine with its many moods, tempos, and singular instrumentation.
The Opus Arte package sports lovely cover art, and the included booklet is elegantly done with gracious notes from Jeanie Thomas. But I do have one problem with the art work: every time I see the main menu, I get hung up for at least 10 minutes day-dreaming about being a lizard.
Yes, the menu makes me think I'm a fat lizard lying low in the leaves of my hiding place in the English woods. Turning my head in all directions, I look out through a thicket of flowers, weeds, and thistle at an astonishing scene. Moonlight illuminates a mist rising from warm fields. Amidst the glow I see layer on layer of silhouettes. Trees and bushes spout up from the meadow. Fairies are everywhere. Their king is blowing on his big horn, and I can tell Puck is there too from his little horns. Some humans are about--one grieving, some embracing in the shadows. And over there is a human with a donkey's head! Behind this I see all the galaxies of the universe (lizards see this better than humans). But never mind, what I really like is that cloud of bugs buzzing about in the gloaming--easy targets for my long sticky tongue! Enough of this. Check out this menu tableau. The Opus Arte HDVD producer Ferenc van Damme dreamed this up, and Ian Cuming was the artist who created it.
The Blu-ray version of the Balanchine 1999 Midsummer Night's Dream is Opus Arte catalog # OA BD7003 D. In April, 2008, CV3 graciously agreed to compare the Opus Arte Blu-ray disc to the HD DVD version that came out earlier.
CV3 is admirable equipped for this task. He is a retired music teacher with an interest in ballet and many other art forms. He has over 7000 DVDs, 300 HD DVDs, and 250 Blu-ray discs, all of which he enjoys in a much-pampered front-projector home theater. Here then are (slighted-edited) comments from CV3 on the Blu-ray version of the Balanchine 1999 Midsummer Night's Dream compared to the HD DVD edition:
"The content of the two discs appear to be the same. The video pictures seemed indistinguishable."
"One slight difference is that the audio is Dolby TrueHD on the HD DVD disc and the audio is uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray. The people at Dolby state that the TrueHD uses a sampling rate of 24 bit 96 KHz. The PCM is set at 16 bit 48 KHz. Does this make a difference?"
"To my ear - and I reached this conclusion before I got my technical information from a friend at Dolby - the only thing I noticed after frequent listening was that the cymbal crashes were slightly more real with the TrueHD than with the Blu-ray. Since I spent a good amount of time in high school and college among the percussion, I listen for cymbal crashes to determine frequency and damping factors in recordings."
"Still, there is little difference between the formats, and certainly not enough to make one better than the other. I played them both simultaneously and switched back and forth as they were playing. Some of the time a friend sat with me going through it again and again. She said she could tell no difference in vision or sound. She is a regular at the opera and symphony and has a good sense of sound and vision."
Thank you, CV3, for these comments.
HD DVD provided the best audio almost from the beginning, and Sony lagged a bit behind. But I think we can assume that Sony will be working hard to promote the use of TrueHD and similar lossless audio formats on its Blu-ray discs.
[Later comment: On June 17, 2008, I played the Blu-ray version of the Balanchine 1999 Midsummer Night's Dream in my home theater (without a hitch) on a Sony Playstation3. I could not distinguish between the HD DVD and the Blu-ray versions. Opus Arte apparently recycled as much a possible from the HD DVD version to the Blu-ray product. The only differences in content I detected were slight changes in the organization of the menu items and the styling of the menu bar. The Blu-ray menu works better but the HD DVD menu design was prettier.]
In my review of the Opus Arte Nureyev 2007 Swan Lake, I predicted that HDVD likely will help popularize ballet. Viewing this Balanchine 1999 Midsummer Night's Dream reinforces my conviction that this will happen.
I had never heard of the Pacific Northwest Ballet Company. I understand now that this company has an international reputation with ballet fans, but it is not a household name. Reading Dance Magazine and Dance International, I see that there are many such regional and smaller companies around the world doing imaginative and striking work. The success of this beautiful Midsummer Night's Dream from the Pacific Northwest Ballet suggests many other smaller ballet companies throughout the world are capable of producing works fully worthy of showing in home theaters.
Prior to the development of HDVD, there was no practical way for the smaller companies to be recorded. The equipment was too heavy, expensive, and resource-greedy for smaller budgets. And neither VHS nor DVD presentation did justice to the show. Only the largest companies with big budgets and world-famous stars could break through these these limitations and publish work that would be noticed by the limited ballet audience.
But now we see proof that with HDVD a regional or small company can create a program that will be welcomed by critical viewers even without world-famous stars. Now we can enjoy a cornucopia of works from ballet companies small and big--and every company and choreographer will have a shot in every production at earning fame all over the world.
May 1, 2008