Agnès Letestu, danseuse étoile of the Paris Opera Ballet, will star in the Paris Ballet in Hanoi on June 11 (Source: VNA) Hanoi (VNA) - Quintessential French ballet will be presented to audiences in Hanoi when some of the best ballet dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet (Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris) perform in the capital city in June.
Agnès Letestu, Mathilde Froustey, and Alice Renavand – stars (danseuse étoile) of the world’s oldest national ballet company - will dance a one-night performance of Paris Ballet.
The performance will also feature other principal dancers from Opéra Berlin, La Scala Theatre Ballet, and the San Francisco Ballet.
According to the artistic director of the Paris Ballet, Frédéric Fontan, the performance will take audiences on a journey to discover French ballet, which is considered the origin of all ballet.
“The performance’s repertoire has been arranged like a ‘sightseeing tour’ for Vietnamese audiences. So they can learn about the development and specific style of French ballet through the centuries since the Paris Opera Ballet was founded under the reign of Louis XIV in the 17th century,” Fontan said at a press conference in Hanoi recently.
The “ballet feast” will present extracts from nine famous ballets, including Carmen, The Nutcracker, Giselle, Don Quichotte, and In the Night.
The performance’s repertoire also features extracts from Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise), Non, je ne regrette rien (No, I regret nothing), Les intermittences du coeur (The Intermittences of the Heart), and La Parc.
The Paris Ballet will also present French pianist Henri Barda, dubbed “The best kept secret of the French piano” by Le Monde in 2008.
Born in 1941 and raised in Cairo, Barda’s prodigious talent was recognised when he was 6 years old by the Polish pianist Ignace Tiegerman (1893-1968), who founded the Conservatoire Tiegerman in Cairo and became Barda’s teacher.
At age 16, Barda moved to Paris to study under maestro Lazare Levy (1882-1964) and then under professor Joseph Benvenuti at the Conservatoire Nationale Superieur, where he graduated with top grades in piano and chamber music. In the late 1960s, he won a four-year scholarship to the Julliard School in New York, where he attended concerts by his favorite virtuosos Sviatoslav Richter and Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall.
Through the influence and guidance of such greats, Barda absorbed various traditions that helped him develop his style of brilliant and elegant -- and sometimes darkly passionate -- performances.
He worked with Jerome Robbins at the Paris Opera on his ballets tributes to Chopin. His recording of three Chopin Sonatas won the Warsaw Chopin Disc Award.
During the Paris Ballet, this renowned interpreter of Chopin and Brahms will beguile the audience with his amazing skill as he accompanies an extract from the ballet In the Night.
Other ballet extracts will be accompanied by the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Principal Conductor Honna Tetsuji.
Paris Ballet was brought to Vietnam by VPBank, with the collaboration of the French Embassy in Vietnam, the French Cultural Centre – l’Espace, and Opal Vietnam. It will be staged at the My Dinh National Convention Hall at 8pm on June 11.-VNA
