LES PATINEURS

Choreography: Sir Frederick Ashton
Music: Giacomo Meyerbeer arranged by Constant Lambert
Design: William Chappell

Premiered 16 February 1937 by Sadler's Wells Ballet

It was Constant Lambert, the troubled but inspirational Musical Director of the Vic-Wells Ballet and lover of the young Margot Fonteyn, who suggested that the ballet music from two of the French composer Meyerbeer's operas (L'Étoile du Nord and the 1849 La Prophete - which had famously featured a corps de ballet on roller skates, well over a century before Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express!) might furnish the ideal score for a skating ballet in development in 1937.

Ninette de Valois, the young company's founding director, found herself unable to make headway with the Meyerbeer project, and handed it over to her rising young choreographer, Frederick Ashton, who reciprocated by delivering to her The Rake's Progress which was proving equally challenging for him. This proved a happy exchange, resulting in a significant landmark work for each dance-maker.

Ashton knew precisely nothing of skating and had never visited an ice-rink in his life, but the delightful ice-skating divertissement he concocted premiered at Sadler's Wells to great public acclaim, spectacularly demonstrating just how far the nascent British ballet had come in six short years from its inception by de Valois.

The ballet's premiere benefited from an illustrious cast, with Margot Fonteyn (Ashton's muse in the late 1930s) and Robert Helpmann as the pas de deux couple and Harold Turner as the Blue Skater (a role not unrelated, perhaps, to the Blue Bird of the classical Sleeping Beauty). It was in this popular success that the dancer Michael Somes first made his mark, attracting notice with his spectacularly impressive elevation, as the leading dancer and Ashton inspiration he was to become.
©Tim Tubbs