Akram Khan’s “Giselle”; Yorke Dance Project, Robert Cohan, and Christopher Bruce; “The Death of Gesualdo”; Vladimir Jurowski and the Russian Diaspora; Wigmore Hall recitals

I.

In changing dear old “Giselle” to a modern work for English National Ballet in 2016, Akram Khan changed two of its most vital ingredients. One: In rearranging the narrative - whereas Giselle used to belong to an old community of Rhine Valley grape-harvesting villagers, now she is part of a community of migrant workers - he omitted the sheer need the ballet’s central characters have to dance. Remember that “Gotta dance” feeling? The traditional Giselle and her aristocrat boyfriend Albrecht loved to dance; Giselle’s mother warned her about dancing too much, but Giselle herself needed even to tell Bathilde, a visiting aristocrat she’d never met before, about this love of dance as if it were her reason for being.  As for the spectral wilis of Act Two (the ballet’s subtitle in 1841 was “ou les wilis”), it is their nature and mission to dance errant men to death. Not so in Khan’s version.

Two: Khan commissioned Vincenzo Lamagna to write a new score that plucks a very few motifs from Adolphe Adam’s score and repeats them dozens or hundreds of times. Much of Lamagna’s score is extremely noisy, and most of it is grim.

People have been revising “Giselle” since it was new in 1841. (By 1843, it had become a four-act ballet at La Scala, Milan, with music by Federico Vicci and Verdi - though the Verdi here may not have been Giuseppe Verdi, who had made his breakthrough in 1842.) I’ve often wished I’d seen Jacky Lansley’s 1980 feminist “I, Giselle”; it impressed many at the time.

Still, I hope none of the other versions have done so much as to un-tell its story as does Khan in this one. (You can feel it’s a snob thing: who would be so vulgar and old-fashioned as to spend time in telling a story in dance?) What few narrative devices Khan employs are staggeringly heavy-handed and subtle. He employs a massive wall, which may symbolise the barrier of the class system or - it rises and turns - the barrier between this life and the supernatural. The spectral wilis of Act Two dance on point, but dance isn’t really their thing: whereas the old wilis danced their victims to death, these ones wield long sticks, with which they prod their victims to death.

Somehow until last week I’d always been on the wrong side of the Atlantic from this production. Now I find I was happier that way. The Lamagna score is the principal horror here, but the general coarseness of Khan’s drama is almost as hard to take. The 1841 “Giselle” featured a touching scene where the peasant Giselle and the aristocrat Bathilde immediately made friendly girl-talk that to some extent broke down the class barrier. You may be sure that was one of the features Khan eliminated from his version;  it then so was Giselle’s mother.

The balletomanes in Hell have to choose between listening to Lamagna’s score for this, to Max Richter’s “Woolf Works” (for Wayne McGregor at Covent Garden), and to Joby Talbot’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (for Christopher Wheeldon, also at Covent Garden). There has been plenty of good music written in this century by British composers, but none of it’s being played for - let alone commissioned by - British  ballet.

II.

The Yorke Dance Project is one of the more impressive recent small-scale initiatives of the international dance scene, gradually becoming more eminent in recent years - but until this week this company has eluded me. The company is based in both London and Los Angeles; it’s directed by Yolande Yorke-Edgell, who has worked hard to resurrect the legacy of the American-born Robert Cohan (1925-2021), the founding choreographer-teacher of the historic London Contemporary Dance Theatre (1967-1994), whose standards and achievements are still much missed throughout the British modern-dance scene.

Cohan’s legacy was already looking creaky, however, by the late 1970s, when a number of British choregraphers - notably Richard Alston and Siobhan Davies - were developing new lines of invention that made Cohan look old-fashioned. There are Cohan works whose power and poetry have left lasting impressions, even after more than forty years, but his male-female duet “Lacrymosa”, created in 2015 for the Yorke troupe, is distinctly stiff: a stodgy example of the intermittently inspired modernism that with Cohan transformed British dance.

The Yorke programme is an interesting anthology of American and British, the old and the new. The weakest item is one of its two premieres, “CAST[X]”, by Liam Francis, an immediately forgettable quartet for two men and two women. But the Linbury programme opens with Martha Graham’s “Deep Song” (1937), a remarkable example of how Graham could create radical drama from the shapes and rhythms created by one woman alone onstage. More unusually, it also included “Kinaesonata” (1970), a fifteen-minute four-part work for eight dancers (music by Alberto Ginastera, a piano sonata) by the Californian choreographer Bella Lewitsky (1916-2004), whose work has never been well known here: it’s a strong piece, lyrically full of contrasts, reaching a peak in a sustained female solo.

The programme’s surprise hit is Christopher Bruce’s “Troubadour”, to music by Leonard Cohen. The rest of the programme has seemed somewhat guarded, but here the dancers cut loose and became far more vividly natural. Four women, in wine-red dresses, dance with four men, in grey suits and hats, using upper and lower bodies with contrasting textures and rhythms, each becoming sexy, adult, individual, covering a range of moods. It’s a surprise to learn that this is the first piece made for ten years by Bruce, now eighty years old. It shows no great change in the choreographic style that he showed in many works between 1980 and 2010 - but it shows why that was style was intensely appealing.

III.

“The Death of Gesualdo” - St Martin in the Fields, January 16-17 - is and isn’t a dance piece. Its music is an anthology of vocal music sung a capella by the all-male Gesualdo Six, madrigals and parts of the Tenebrae mass by Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613), whose harmonies anticipate the music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The staging, by Bill Barclay, links this music to - and contrasts it with - the life and death of Gesualdo, lastingly notorious for having murdered his first wife and her lover, then on having exhibited their bodies in public for days, and then for being found not guilty (he being an aristocrat) of their deaths. We may feel that Barclay wishes us to see visual equivalents to, or counterparts of, the dissonances in Gesualdo’s music. There are no dance steps - there are no dance rhythms in the musoc - but a series of strikingly dramatic tableaux is performed by a small number of silent actors , illustrating Gesualdo’s life, with puppets by Janni Younge and costumes by Arthur Oliver. These tableaux are choreographed by Will Tuckett. The lighting (by Barclay) and tableaux often evoked Caravaggio (1571-1610) - Gesualdo’s no less controversial contemporary. (One further performance will be staged in New York on February 13, in the Cathedral of St John the Divine.) The expressive tension of those tableaux does what Barclay hopes: they successfully connect the strains of Gesualdo’s life to the radical harmonies of his music.

IV.

On Wednesday 21, conductor Vladimir Jurowski returned to the London Philharmonic Orchestra to lead a concert of music from what we may loosely call the modern Russian diaspora: Sergei Prokofiev’s second symphony (composed in Paris, 1925); Alexander Molosov’s “The Iron Foundry” (1927, Moscow); Rachmaninov’s famous “Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini” (1934, composed in Switzerland and premiered in Baltimore); and “Terricone” (2023), by Anna Korsun, the Ukrainian composer now resident in Britain. These are four very different composers, but certainly the 1925-1934 scores reflect the tremendous injection of violent, neoprimitivist energy given by Russia to modernist music - with Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (1913) casting long shadows. The London Philharmonic’s playing was superlative, above all in the stinging brass fanfares that open the seldom-heard Prokofiev symphony. This symphony has only two movements: Jurowski played the second movement’s theme and variations as if creating a further pause and create three movements. It remains a structurally strange work, but covering amazing terrain. Prokofiev was a good housewife, often re-using musical ideas  - he took some of this work’s more dangerous savagery and reapplied it in the second scene of his 1929 ballet “The Prodigal Son”.

V.

The Wigmore Hall has started the year with a series of wonderful recitals, sometimes of individual composers: the pianist Kit Armstrong in Mozart (January 12); the Italian mezzosoprano Anna Bonitatibus in Rossini (January 16); the German baritone Christian Gerhaher (January 20) and the pianist Imogen Cooper (January 18), both in Schubert. In the final quarter of his January 13 recital, countertenor Iestyn Davies (with harpist) reached the sublime in Purcell (“Sweeter than roses) and Handel (arias from “Partenope” and “Theodora”) - my most marvellous experience of this singer to date. The French soprano Sabine Devieilhe (January 14), singing a range of French and German songs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rightly enchanrr the hall, winning three encores: the very sound of her (small) voice, radiant and subtly vibrant, seems the quintessence of France, though her diction in German lieder is also excellent. Christian Gerhaher’s long established partnership with pianist Gerold Huber is exemplary: on this occasion, they were exploring lesser-known lieder in gently  melancholic vein, but never seemed stuck in one mood. Even though Gerhaher is just past his vocal prime, his diction remains marvellous - and he often still lodges a vocal line with mezza voce intimacy as if in the listener’s ear.

Sunday 18 was Imogen Cooper’s final recital at the Wigmore Hall, though she will return for a couple of liederabenden. Every phrase breathed with the life of dynamic variety. At the end, speaking to the audience after the Duke of Kent had presented her with the Wigmore Medal, she recalled attending performances at the hall with her father, the critic Martin Cooper, and wondering if one day she too might play on that platform. She spoke of the hall’s singular synergy between stage and audience; and she thanked the audience “from the bottom of my heart - and from the middle of my heart - and from the top of my heart.”

@Alastair Macaulay 2026

First published in Slipped Disc, January 11, 2026