LONDON -- Frederick Ashton was listening to the radio one evening in April 1962 when he heard Liszt's ''Piano Sonata in B minor.'' ''Almost immediately,'' he later said, ''I could hear the whole thing in it.'' That thing was his ballet ''Marguerite and Armand,'' created for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in 1963, and based on the 1852 Alexandre...
LONDON -- Some sort of collective unconscious artistic will determined that ''Cinderella'' would be the ''Nutcracker'' of this year's Christmas dance season in Britain. There are no fewer than four productions dotted about the country, two of them in London: the Royal Ballet's grand 1948 production by Frederick Ashton, and Matthew Bourne's vividly...
It's amazing how much the whole climate of the Metropolitan Opera House improves once American Ballet Theater stops presenting its 19th-century classics. In the penultimate week of its season at the house, the company is shuffling seven one-act ballets and four pas de deux into different arrangements, and on Tuesday that meant ''All-Classic...