A dance fantasy to the music of Saint-Saens.
Adapted for television and produced by Patricia Foy.
[Starring] Ballet Rambert
Joan and Valerie Trimble (two pianos)
A scene from the original Ballet Rambert production
A dance fantasy to the music of Saint-Saens at 9.20
Saint-Saens was at the height of his musical career in 1886, when he composed this elegant suite of fourteen numbers which he sub-titled, with that slender irony so often found in his work, 'a grand zoological fantasy'. He played one of the piano parts at its first performance, but seems to have had strong reservations about the work as a whole, for apart from the immensely popular item, 'Le Cygne', he kept the work unpublished, and it did not become widely available until after his death in 1921.
Animal ballets are frequent among non-professional groups but the true choreographer knows all too well how difficult it is to create, either in lyric or parodic terms, animal movements and characteristics which can be adequately expressed by human dancers. Such a score as this, with its self-contained scenario, is a challenge which has been met by two English choreographers recently. In 1943 Andree Howard ma