La Fille Mal Gardée
At the break of dawn, the beautiful Lise tiptoes out of a house in a small rustic village utterly disappointed that her boyfriend Colas is nowhere to be found. The handsome but penniless Colas is loathed by her mother Simone who has arranged for Lise to be married to the wealthy but oafish Alain.
The scene is from Act 1, Scene 1 of La Fille Mal Gardée which I was fortunate to watch several moons ago in a college production in Argentina. The images are still as vivid as if I were still watching the show unfold, performed respectably by ballet artists whose names I can no longer recall. I never had the chance to watch the ballet in a huge production the way Frederick Ashton revived it in 1960 for the Royal Ballet of London, or in many other adaptations that followed. I am, however, fortunate to own an LP of its excerpts which I often listen to with pride and joy. The wide-band LP (Decca/SXL/2313) is rare, and I am one of the extremely lucky to own a clean copy.
The ballet announces itself with Herold’s overture, adapted from Martini’s Le Droit du Seigneur. The woodwind produces sounds such as bird-calls, as well as a cock-crowing effect on the oboe, while the violins maintain their long and peaceful melody. The scene segues straight into the Dance of Cock and Hens – a bright and lovely dance which features some of the wide range percussions for specific effects.
La Fille debuted in 1789, two weeks before the fall of the Bastille, with Dauberval choreographing its original Bordeaux version. It was repackaged in 1828 by the chorus master of the Paris Opera, preserving several numbers from the original. Further versions were arranged in 1864 and in 1937, but it took 170 years — the time when Ashton asked John Lanchbery to provide the score for its revival for the ballet to find the right musical ingredients worthy of its timeless allure.
La Fille is the first ballet to weave a story about ”real people,” rather than gods or kings and queens. Its hero and heroine are ordinary young couple. Its plot is a very undemanding but utterly humorous deviation on the ”boy meets girl/problems arise and are overcome/boy gets girl” theme – a typical love story. Early on, not a few frowned on its simplistic approach, unconvinced that a comedy could be on equal footing with a tragedy. La Fille’s wide public acclaim puts all these concerns to rest.
Dame Marie Rambert, a Polish-Jewish a dance pedagogue who exerted a great influence on the British art of dance, described La Fille as “the first great English classic.” Yes, the Royal Ballet version was only one of several, but she believed nonetheless that no other ballet in British history “has so instantly established itself, or been greeted with such near-unanimous joy by critics and audience alike.”
La Fille had me excited all over again when I chanced upon cousins and best pals Congressman Jack Duavit and investment consultant Keith Roy while they were setting up their room the night before the recently concluded 5th annual Hi-Fi show at the Mandarin Hotel. They were to showcase a speaker system from Von Schweikert audio which they fondly called the bulilits (Unifield 3). The two are the local distributors of Von Schweikert transducers and Lamm electronics products. It took the two with the help of some friends up to the wee hours to set up the whole system, but the long wait was worth it.
Keith spun several musical pieces from a CD player and when the turntable was ready for spinning, Jack excitedly plucked out one LP after another from his customized aluminum box. The diminutive bulilits sang like they were in the league of their bigger brothers, the VR4s and VR5s. But as soon as the cartridge finally touched the grooves of Jack’s copy of La Fille, I knew that the cousins had another winner on their hands. It helped that I was very familiar with the soundtrack so that I knew when and where a particular passage would spring out of the soundstage. And boy, those speakers can fill out the whole room with beautiful music!
The bulilits certainly caught and held my attention. I had my ears glued to them for the duration of the entire LP. In my mind, with my eyes closed, and the music exuberantly flowing around me, I could see ballerinas gracefully dancing on tiptoes and doing graceful pirouettes, and Colas, Lise and Alain in an intricate pas de trios.
The Von Schweikert website describes the speakers as dynamic-driver “augmented one-way” system using a full-range driver for “image lock” supported by a subwoofer and ribbon super tweeter. The woofers have a hybrid design, a triple-chambered transmission line coupled to the room by a tuned vent at 32 Hz. This must be the reason I could hear a wide range of harmonics, from the lows to the highs. Specifically designed for flat and condominium dwellers, the speakers do not take much space and are easy to move around.
All the possible speakers’ attributes — imaging, layering and dynamics — that audiophiles look for can be had from this small package. I certainly got all that and more, as the Von Schweikert Unifield 3 transported me that night to the charming countryside where the characters of La Fille lived out the bucolic pleasures and sensual joys of romantic love.
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