Just in: Northern Ballet will perform new season ‘with recorded music’
balletTo the shame and disgrace of all involved, from Arts Council England to the company management, Northern Ballet today announced its 2024-25 season with music provided on recordings.
Check it out here.
The following season, no doubt, the dancers will be replaced by holograms.
Hi Norman. Just for accuracy, about half of the shows will have a live orchestra and half will have pre-recorded music. It’s very clear which venues have which on the booking page. Of course that means that half the audiences will only see half a show, even though the ticket prices aren’t half the amount. It also doesn’t say how the orchestra membership is supposed to survive on half a job. On current form, Northern Ballet are winning the closely contested race to the bottom, and it’s shameful.
The main crowd-pullers are without orchestra. No less depressing is the failure of national media to report this downgrade.
It was certainly covered in the Guardian and the BBC:
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/dec/04/northern-ballet-plans-to-use-recorded-music-what-next-robot-dancers
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-66961618
I have been to ballet with recorded music. it happens. If the dancing and the sound system are good enough, you quickly forget.
One ballet out of four with recorded music. By Carl Davis, primarily a film and TV composer. I do not see A Christmas Carol listed among his ballets; he did write a 17-minute suite on the theme, as well as some other Christmas music.
It seems likely that there is no orchestral score with parts for a complete ballet so Northen Ballet has opted to use his suite and other selections of his music in a compilation. You can hardly expect a busy orchestra to invest the time and energy into assembling all these parts and learning a piece that they may never play again. There are now very few ballet companies that have their own orchestras; Northern Ballet would have to reach out to all of them in an attempt to find interest in presenting this ballet, with this music, to justify the expense of getting it orchestrated.
I think your characterisation of a company presenting one ballet out of four with recorded music as “shame and disgrace” is very mean-minded. Ballet companies and orchestras are under immense financial constraint, and yet this little company, whose reputation punches well above its weight, brings joy where nobody else bothers to provide. God bless ’em, every one.
I’m afraid you are mistaken V Lind. Carl Davis was commissioned to write a full length score by Christopher Gable for Northern Ballet in 1992. The music is full of great tunes and Carl’s vivid orchestration – I guarantee the audience impact will be greatly reduced by the use of recorded music. The orchestra parts are owned by Northern Ballet and the only saving made here will be at the expense of the musicians’ livelihoods.
Thank you: I did not know that. My argument was principally based upon the cost of a new piece.
But the rest remains. Financial restraints affect all the arts. Presumably the Northern Ballet cannot afford the orchestra for everything and it had to make choices. I thought it worked with Northern Sinfonia — or do they have their own orchestra, or are the two intertwined?
And when the sound system is good enough, it does work. I spent years with the National Ballet of Canada, and they had their own Ballet Orchestra, but a very few times they used recorded music — once for a Merce Cunningham piece they had leased briefly. It did not detract.
And I still remember the National Ballet School doing Van Dantzig’s Four Last Songs, which he had given the school as a gift. That’s a piece I have attended in concert many times, and I still prefer to listen to it recorded. A live version would not work as well for a ballet, yet this recorded ballet remains one of the most wonderful things I have ever seen on the ballet stage. And it made me, a previous sceptic, a Strauss devotee.
The Northern Ballet Sinfonia have performed this many times over the years. A Christmas Carol is one of their regular ballets. It’s always had an orchestra that loves to play it.
By moving to recorded music they are putting the sinfonia out of work for the whole season. The orchestra are not too busy for this, they are losing their jobs.
Completely disagree.. I went to see Matthew Bourne’s sleeping beauty and I was shocked that it was recorded music, it lacked all the the drama, I wouldn’t return to a show like that and nowadays always check if it’s with live music, even if I have to call or write to the venue to find out!
This is one of the first things I check before buying tickets to stage productions … and if the music is canned, I run the other way.
Misery. Misery for the audience, misery for the dancers, double misery for the orchestras and the conductors. The conductors are often of very sophisticated training and experience. And as a side-irritation, I’ve no doubt the recorded music will be over-amplified.
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I thought we knew that already. Might be ok but from a personal point of view I would never go to see a performance that was effectively with a backing track. Just not my thing.
disgraceful. what a sorry state of affairs. this is so depressing & will alienate huge sections of the usual audience who will be so upset and angry they will want to boycott the shows in protest
This happened twice in Canberra in 2023. In May, The Grand Kyiv Ballet of Ukraine performed Zhukovsky’s Forest Song and after interval a condensed 1 hour version of Don Quixote with score by Ludwig Minkus. No orchestra – dancing to a recorded backing. Then in September, The Royal Czech Ballet visited, performing Sleeping Beauty, score by Tchaikovsky – again recorded backing.
The presence of a live orchestra in my view, is 50% of the whole experience, particularly with the inclusion of a conductor. Plus, crucially, the flexibility of slight variations in tempo and dynamics.
I was grumpy about this on both occasions and felt we’d all been short-changed.
As the evening progressed however, I forgot about the lack of an orchestra and fully turned my attention the the dancers.
One amusing thing that happened during the Czech performance was that I asked a man sitting next to me if he was enjoying the performance, to which he replied, “There seems to be a distinct lack of swans”. I gently explained that he was at a performance of Sleeping Beauty, not Swan Lake. At least he got the composer right!
I feel for the loyal freelance musicians of this band -their livlihoods impoverished by covid lockdowns – and now the final axe. I wonder what other options NB management considered – other than shedding dancers. It appears to have been beyond the wit, ingenuity and combined resources of ACE and Leeds City Council to secure the future of live music at any NB performances – not even those in its home city!
Often these things are a prelude to no season at all. What a shame!
Not least as in this case, I believe, NB’s Arts Council shows an agreement by NB to give live musicians work. If they break this commitment it’s hard to see why the AC would continue their funding.
Suicidal decision
A bit “off topic” but I’m reminded of the furore which surrounded the BBC’s “Top of the Pops” in the 1960s when it was realised that the acts were miming to piped music and “miming” was banned. Then a compromise was reached. You can look up the story on Wikipedia under “Miming in instrumental performance”. In the end, the extra musicians had to be present even if the singing/playing was mimed. One step away from NB giving up having real dancers performing and just showing films of old ballets… Next up ENO? To misquote the context of Joni Mitchell’s song “Big Yellow Taxi” – “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.
Some of you have said that when watching a performance you soon forgot you were listening to a ‘backing’ track. Unfortunately it’s not a ‘backing’ track, but an imprisonment of the dancers. The dancers listen to and express the music in their movements. The conductor watches the dancers, and can respond to, say, a slightly more expansive moment by an inspired dancer, an extra moment of reflection in a quiet point of drama, or even a slight, even very slight, miss-time of a leap or lift. It is live performance after all. I once heard Sir Edward
Downes, a conductor whose wife was a dancer, say that a bad conductor could literally break a dancer’s leg. Or a dancer may feel extra energy if the musicians find some special inspiration together one evening. Orchestral musicians are trained, alert, and expert at responding to the conductor at those times. It’s part of the magic. It’s what orchestras do when playing together, or accompanying soloists, and what chamber musicians or any ensemble does, all the time. It’s the joy of live performance. To confine the dancers to dancing exactly the same way every night is to take away their freedom of expression and make them automata.
This deception is nothing new.
Pre covid I went to hear/see a Matthew Bourne ballet of a Tchaikovski score (can’t remember which). I was horrified to hear the superb score as an amplified recording – no band in the pit at all.
I hear on the jungle drums that his 40th anniversary production of the popular all male Swan Lake about to hit number one UK theatres later this year is bandless too.
However, when they play Sadler’s Wells Theatre over Christmas, there will be a band, albeit heavily reduced and rescored accordingly.
Seems as though the theatres seeing the work in the provinces will be hearing another amplified recording and not a live acoustic band.
How this company get away with this beggars belief in this day and age.
Why can’t the Musicians Union do something to prevent this travesty?
What a depressing state of affairs. Who is next to be axed? Their is no will to fund the arts by this philistine government. We will never get it back once it’s gone.
One thing worth mentioning though is that the Northern Ballet Sinfonia did vote against becoming salaried a few years ago… I fully support them but I think that’s relevant to mention.