Three Ballets

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 633, 17 August 1951, Page 15

Three Ballets

N edition of the BBC programme Ring Up the Curtain to be heard from 2YC next week will have a special interest for lovers of the ballet. The music, in which Robert Irving conducts the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is taken from three famous ballets in the Sadler’s Wells repertoire, and each is introduced by the ballerina whose name is most closely associated with it-Margot Fonteyn, the prima ballerina of Sadler’s Wells, Moira Shearer, and Beryl Grey. Margot Fonteyn’s memories of The Sleeping Beauty to Tchaikovski’s music are associated with great occasions both for Sadler’s Wells and for herself. The first time she danced on the Covent Garden stage was in the gala performance of* this ballet before the President of the French Republic in 1939. She remembers, too, how The Sleeping Beauty thrilled audiences at the re-opening of Covent Garden after the war, and on a night in October, 1949, when Sadler’s Wells gave its’ first performance in New York and set the newspapers raving over the return of the great days of the ballet. Moira Shearer introduces excerpts from Cinderella, Frederick Ashton’s ballet to music by Prokofieff, and the orchestra

return to Tchaikovski for the final part of the programme in which Beryl Grey recalls her experience of .dancing the dual role of Odette and Odile in Swan Lake. This

BBC ballet programme will be broadcast by 2YC at 9.0 p.m. on Friday, August 24.