<B>Gloom, Doom and the Fate of the World</B><P>By Edith Boxberger in The Frankfurter Allgemeine<P><BR> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>HAMBURG. The name almost says it all. "The Britten Evening," which opened the 27th Hamburg Ballet Festival on July 1, featured three ballets performed to music by the composer Benjamin Britten. Yet the works themselves were also created by contemporary choreographers of some renown -- artists whose visions proved to be uniformly dark. <P>The gloomiest piece, despite its highly colorful staging, was "VIII," set to Britten's "Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge" and choreographed by the youngest of the three, 28-year-old Christopher Wheeldon from New York. John Neumeier's nocturnal "Serenade," performed to Britten's fragile-sounding "Serenade for Tenor, Horn and String Orchestra," mourned humanity's lost innocence, and Vergessenes Land (Forgotten Land), Jiri Kylian's 20-year-old choreography to the "Sinfonia da Requiem," was the only piece to derive any hope from loss.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P><A HREF="http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/docmain.asp?rub={B1311FFE-FBFB-11D2-B228-00105A9CAF88}&doc={%3953486CB-6FDB-11D5-A3B5-009027BA22E4}" TARGET=_blank><B>more...</B></A>