Great or horrible, a poll!

15.12.2006, Arto Wikla

In the LuteList someone pointed us a YouTube video showing (parts) of Lully's Bourgeois Gentilhomme setup by Jean Marie Bigard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crgelhKxz34&eurl

Because this version of Lully's ballet is quite "different" and clearly controversial, I wanted to know, how the list members would react to it. (BTW, to me it could be either horrible or great, and only after a while I decided it is great...)

My question in 4.12.2006 was: "So how would you set the aesthetic quality of the (parts) of Bourgeois Gentilhomme setup by Jean Marie Bigard [...]
Let the scale be: 1=horrible, 2=..., ..., 5=great. You can answer to the list or privately to me - I promise to keep the secret! In a week or so I'll publish the results."

Results

There were (only) 14 answers that I could interprete to be answers. Of those mails 5 were private and 9 were sent to the List. In some cases I had to interprete the answer. For ex. one answer gave "-10". Also that was scaled to 1 of my scale of 1 to 5. In one answer I could not find out, whether it said "great" or "horrible". 

       grade          %                                           ;-)

        ? *          7.1
        1 *****     35.8
        2 *          7.1        the average is  2.9
        3            0.0        (? excluded)
        4 ****      28.6
        5 ***       21.4
As expected, the result is very bipolar.

Comments

Here are comments of some voters (anonymously):

"Great show! Work of Art! Lully's music works well also that way. And I am sure Lully himself has a happy smile in his face, when he watches YouTube in Elysium!"

"Unspeakably dreadful. Putting a drum track on 'classical' or, in this Baroque music, is reaching out to an audience that simply shouldn't be there if they need that level of support to get them to turn up and pay attention. And the drumming is utterly awful; lacklustre - worn-out gestures from worn-out rock drumming."

"The music seems to me to be a skillful adaptation of music that was, after all, supposed to have some movement and beat to it. As to the dancing, it's not it's not bad dancing by anybody's standard (that I know of, anyway). I'm not shocked..."

"I have watched it a couple times and have grown to like it."

"It reminds me of one of those saturday night television variety shows I had to suffer as a kid. Your grandma will also probably love it, nice young people dancing about to some pleasant classical music with a lively 'beat'."

"Utter Crap. Probably a Eurovision Song Contest 'Warm-up' act."

"As far as the choreography, I enjoy it... Reminds me of a lot of the Opus Arte Baroque Opera dvds"

"To me, the artistic dancing was modern and tasteful. It blended well with the music, which to many new ears may thought to have been written specially for it. Only the true fans of Lully might disapprove."

"Makes the would be disco-Lully dancers look like wooden dolls, indeed. Not to mention the death-by-drumcomputer sound track to their eurovision act."

"The audio/ video quality was poor, the guy looked weird and the melody just didn't hook me."

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