Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
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arts the Smillie is inspired by Wagner���s opera Parsifal and the search for the Holy Grail. and engineering mass starvation of his people, found time to express his opinion on the respective merits of ballerinas. I cannot overstress this: While the dancing, in splendid sets and appropriately opulent costumes, is a delight, the driving power of the music ��� sometimes tender, other times surging with energy; melodic yet with a strong strain of modernity ��� is what has lived in my memory from past revivals. March 1 (8 p.m.) and March 2 (2 p.m. and 8 p.m.) in the Kentucky Center���s Whitney Hall. Still dancing Smillie���s PICKS By Thomson Smillie Illustration by Bart Galloway To the dance ��oor www.actorstheatre.org 118 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 Dance provides the main interest this month, with the Louisville Orchestra a close second. March opens with the Louisville Ballet���s glittering Romeo and Juliet, one of few works in which the splendor of the orchestral score equals the action onstage (also coming to mind: Stravinsky���s Rite of Spring and any of Tchaikovsky���s major ballet scores, but especially Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty). Romeo and Juliet���s composer, Sergei Prokofev, was another great Russian master, one of those polymaths (not unusual in Russia) who was equally at home in the symphony hall, the opera house and the ballet world. While ballet often takes second place to opera in terms of popularity and resources in some countries, in Russia it has rightly been seen as a national glory. Even Joe Stalin, between bouts of purging his rivals I know we do go on a bit about how the Internet opens doors for inquiring minds, but search for ���MOMIX Botanica��� and watch a seven-minute YouTube video that will instantly convert you into a fan of this dance group. Founded 30 years ago by Moses Pendleton, the troupe is based in rural Connecticut and employs ���dancer-illusionists.��� Te result: dazzlingly athletic choreography, wonderful costumes and lighting illusions that, in Botanica, celebrate the glories of nature, of spring and, for me at least, the joy of being alive. Book early and get seats upstairs at the Brown Teatre, as sightlines for ballets are lousy from the lower foor. Performance is March 8 at 8 p.m. Lights, camera, action���music Te Louisville Orchestra should have a banner month. In Whitney Hall on March 14 at 10:30 a.m. and the following night at 8 p.m., the orchestra, under conductor Jorge Mester, will perform with piano soloist Chu-Fang Huang, a Chinese pianist who has won a stack of prizes and is making a major career in a massively crowded feld. Pieces include the rarely heard Burleske by Richard Strauss, but the real oddball of the program is Camille Saint-Sa��ns��� ���Organ Symphony,��� which is a full-blown work of the sort the French delight in, kind of like the Arc de Triomphe set to music. On March 28 (10:30 a.m.) and 29 (8 p.m.), Mester will again be wavin��� the stick around for a mixed-media event that combines video projection, actors, historical audio samples and too many other components to list ��� all performed before, during and at intervals between the music.��Creator of this mammoth endeavor, shared with three other cities and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is Joseph Horowitz, a musical agitator and