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Bliss - Checkmate / Gordon - Rake’s Progress

£26.34

Currently out of stock at the UK suppliers. Available to order, but is likely to take longer than usual to despatch

Label: VAI

Cat No: DVDVAI4379

Barcode: 0089948437994

Format: DVD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Ballet

Artists

Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet & Orchestra

Conductor

Barry Wordsworth

Artists

Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet & Orchestra

Conductor

Barry Wordsworth

About

Two masterpieces of twentieth-century British ballet danced by the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet. Created for the Vic-Wells Ballet in the 1930s by founderchoreographer Ninette de Valois, Checkmate and The Rake’s Progress remain cornerstones of the British ballet repertoire.

The scores, by Sir Arthur Bliss and Gavin Gordon, respectively, are here performed by the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet Orchestra under the direction of Barry Wordsworth.

Filmed in 1982 at Sadler’s Wells Theater, London.
Colour, 87 min.

Checkmate: A Ballet in One Act with Prologue
Music: Sir Arthur Bliss
Choreography: Dame Ninette de Valois

Checkmate, one of the pillars of contemporary British ballet, was created in 1937 by choreographer Ninette de Valois (1898-2001) in response to an idea by composer Sir Arthur Bliss (1891-1975). It remained in the repertoire for more than four decades and is still regularly revived.

The ballet portrays a game of love and death, played according to rules of chess. It is won by the Black Queen who first captures the Red Queen, then defeats the Red Knight, and finally delivers the Red King to her warriors.

The Rake's Progress: A Ballet in Six Scenes
Music and Scenario: Gavin Gordon
Choreography: Dame Ninette de Valois

The Rake’s Progress, which premiered in 1935, is one of the first classics of the native English school of ballet. The work’s creator, Ninette de Valois, called the ballet her “Homage to Hogarth,” a reference to the brilliant caricaturist whose paintings inspired her choreography. The music is by Gavin Gordon (1901-1970), who also wrote the scenario based on Hogarth’s drawings.

They portray the swift fall of a young man who squanders his newly inherited fortune in brothels and gambling dens and is ultimately cast into Bedlam, London’s notorious madhouse, where, wasted by disease and consumed by remorse, he ends his days.