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A year of ballet playing cards #54 (Red Joker): Odalisques from Le Corsaire

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Fragment of Odalisques from Le Corsaire (sheet music)

Click on the image to download the file

It’s that time of year again, ballet summer schools season, when teachers are supposed to tell you in advance what they are going to do in the repertoire classes, but they don’t decide until they’re making the coffee in the green room on the first day. Then they come into the studio, and see that they have a boy in the class that they weren’t expecting and it all changes again. Or they’re teaching a version of Swan Lake that has an interpolation in it that they didn’t realise was interpolated, and in fact not by Tchaikovsky at all, until today.

I’d bet money on the fact that if you play for summer schools, someone is going to say “Odalisques” to you, and expect you to know what they mean, and to have the score saved on your brain’s USB stick. As an aside, you might just ponder the fact that boys on summer schools get to be princes, heroes, idealists and poets. If you’re a girl? Here, I have a harem chambermaid solo for you. 

Repertoire classes in the YouTube era

Repertoire classes have got worse for pianists (and others) since YouTube, because people in Vladivostok post stuff from a rare Soviet gala that they digitized from a VHS tape that they recorded in 1986, someone in a vocational school in England sees it and decides that it would be perfect for Arabella’s solo at the end of year show. For the performance, Arabella plugs her phone into the sound system at the side of the stage, and gets her friend to press play on YouTube, because it’s 2018, and that’s how we roll. A week later, Arabella’s  teacher is teaching at a summer school and says knowledgeably “I thought we’d do the third act girl’s solo from The Cobbler of Archangelsk, do you have that?”  The recriminations when you say you don’t. “But Arabella did it in Minehead, and the pianist could play it by ear.” Don’t get me started. 

People seem to be frustrated when their flesh-and-blood supplier of music (i.e. the pianist) isn’t like YouTube. You can’t type <YAGP Elena Razumovsky 2014> on their forehead and wait for a result.  The look of bewilderment when you say you just don’t have something, or don’t know it; don’t get me started. 

Odalisques from Corsaire: a typical problem, and now a solution! 

The solos from the pas de trois from Le Corsaire for three Odalisques keeps turning up at summer schools and repertoire classes, and I keep printing off the handwritten score from IMSLP.  Le Corsaire is in the repertoire of many companies, but you can’t download or buy a score, or rather, the one you can buy is expensive and covered in all kinds of copyright notices because it’s someone’s version. Thank God for IMSLP, and for the two people who uploaded a couple of incomplete handwritten scores from cupboard in Russia somewhere.  But these are only just OK. The second odalisque takes up four handwritten pages of score with awkward page turns, whereas in my typeset version, it fits on a single page. 

Then there’s that moment where you thought you were safe with the solo, and then the teacher says halfway through the last class, “I thought as we’ve got a bit of time, we’d do the coda.” Have you got the coda? Of course you haven’t, don’t get me started. 

Then there’s that other moment where you triumphantly come into the studio with the score, play all the way through to the last page, and oh—wait! What’s that? The teacher looks at you like you just rammed her car at the traffic lights.  That’s not how it goes? Maestro, you must have cut some bars out? No, no, no, we don’t need that! Out comes the YouTube clip on the iPad, and you find that there’s another version that you didn’t know about. Don’t get me started. 

At least for Odalisques, help is at hand. Here, free to download, is the pas de trois, with the intro, three solos, and the coda. The Bolshoi version and the Mariinsky version (there might be several, for all I know, don’t get me started) have slightly different endings for the entrée and the coda. Because I’m nice, I’ve put both in. 

A useful pas de trois to keep by the bread bin

Apart from being useful if you are going to be playing for the actual pas de trois, Odalisques is handy material for class. The opening is a curious mixture of legato, wafty, and allegro-like music. It’s perfect for when you’re not sure what kind of music is needed, because it’s got a bit of everything. The three solos and the coda are all at that slightly awkward in-the-middle tempo that you need for some exercises. For sure it’s not the most interesting music, but it’s useful. 

Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist day #22: Inappropriate music choices

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HorsesWhen I say inappropriate, I don’t mean in 4/4 rather than 3/4, or a barcarole instead of a mazurka. I mean inappropriate in the sense of “Oh no. Let the earth swallow me up. Get me out of this tune now.” By the time you’ve realised your mistake, it’s too late.

Accidentally playing Edelweiss for company class in Germany comes somewhere near the top of my red-faced moments,  though years later I discovered that nobody in Germany knows The Sound of Music (I guess that figures, really), and that playing Zarah Leander songs – which I did –  is probably in more questionable taste. You have a whole 64 counts to endure before you can get out of the tune and into something else, and if you try to snake out of it by turning it into an improvisation that just happens to have the first three notes of Edelweiss, it sounds like you don’t know the tune, or are trying (which is the case) to cover your tracks.

Worse than playing showbiz reminders of a country’s political past, is playing anything from The Nutcracker, Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty in company class. Ballet repertoire’s a strange one, though. A lot of people say they don’t like it for class, but in practice, it often goes down quite well, as long as it isn’t one of those three. I have a league table in my head of things you can just about get away with if you pick your moment. Etudes is somewhere near the top of it, together with stuff from the Imperial repertoire that you might only see on Russian Youtube. It’s a gamble that works both ways, though. Sometimes you play stuff that you think people will have a fond nostalgia for, and it’s like they never heard it before. Another time, you gingerly play something you think is too well known, and they just look at you and go “What is that?” Other times, you play something you think is just a tune, and it happens to be part of someone’s ballet, so they start doing the steps at the back.

Maybe failed humour is the worst thing. To pick something you think is going to be amusing, only to find that no-one’s in a the mood for humour, or they don’t get it, or the music doesn’t work for the exercise anyway is a form of embarrassment you can’t hide from.   You realise it in the first 8 bars, and you’ve got at least another 24 to go. It’s like having to lick the egg off your own face.