In December 2024 Shanghai Ballet mount four performances of Carl Davis’ The Lady of the Camellias, choreographed by Derek Deane, at Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane. The run follows their 2019-20 debut of this specially created version of his 2008 score for the company, which received 36 performances in a Chinese tour.
Davis’ 100-minute score, for large orchestra, is lush and extravagant. It effortlessly conjures the Parisian demimonde in music that recalls Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Offenbach, with its waltzes, galops, and dramatic tableau for the corps de ballet. Highlights include the macabre waltz that opens the ballet, as Marguerite, dying of tuberculosis, hallucinates their earlier love affair. The happiness of the couple in the countryside – too complete to be believed – unfolds in a lengthy adagio. Brass rasp and whoop in a suggestive csárdás for Marguerite’s rival Olympe. A death march haunts Marguerite throughout the opera, presaging her tragic end.
The ballet, which debuted in 2008 with the National Ballet of Croatia in Zagreb, flowed from a long-standing relationship with Verdi’s famous operatic adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ novel, which he first heard broadcast from the Met as a child and later worked on with New York City Opera; in 1978 Davis created a score for a BBC adaptation of the story. When Deane approached Davis about his own ballet, he was determined to include several scenes from the novel omitted in Verdi’s opera, such as Marguerite’s friends freeloading at her country retreat and her final visit to Armand after her humiliation at Olympe’s party.
In 2023 Deane choreographed Davis’ Le Fantôme et Christine for Shanghai Ballet, a reimagining of Gaston Leroux’s tale that recast Christine as a ballerina rather than singer. His first collaboration with Davis was Alice in Wonderland in 2006 for English National Ballet, which toured the UK and subsequently transferred to Pittsburgh Ballet theatre.
November and December 2024 also see Davis’ A Christmas Carol tour with Northern Ballet as part of their seasonal offering. Massimo Morricone’s choreography, a company mainstay over the years, is designed by Lez Brotherston. The 90-minute score for chamber orchestra, has proven one of Davis’ biggest hits for the ballet stage, receiving over 350 performances since its premiere in 1992. Aside from numerous revivals by Northern Ballet over the years, Morricone’s choreography appeared with the Royal New Zealand Ballet, where it toured nationally in 2014. It was also choreographed in 2019 by Rinus Sprong and Thom Stuart for De Dutch Don’t Dance Division in The Hague, whose staging was revived in 2022.