"Essential Balanchine"

New York City Ballet
May 23, 2007
New York State Theater

Walpurgisnacht Ballet
Liebeslieder Walzer
Symphony in Three Movements

Much has been made (though not by me) about NYCB’s new "theme" programming, but let me tell you, they can call these things "Larry, Moe, and Curly" for all I care as long as they keep giving us lots of Balanchine danced at the highest level, as it was last night. Each ballet looked so fresh that it was like seeing it anew.

Walpurgisnacht is not anything I would consider "essential" (I guess the marketers had to come up with something); in fact, usually when I see it on the program I think, ok, it’s not great, but it’s not like it’s something I wouldn’t sit through. Recent casts haven’t helped, making it look like a piece of kitschy-ballety stuff. Last night Sara Mearns had the main role and she was terrific. The ballet’s still no Four Temperaments, but she danced as if it mattered. Her movements are strongly accented yet they happen within a lyrical, musical framework, a style that brings a very engaging tension to her dancing. You want to keep watching her.

Ana Sophia Scheller was the soloist and she also did a very good job. It is still obvious when she starts to run out of steam, but this stamina problem seems to improve from performance to performance. Ask La Cour was Mearns’s partner, and there were a few mishaps in the pas de deux (hmm; see my review of May 19; maybe he needs to work on his partnering skills).

Liebeslieder (Darci Kistler and Philip Neal; Kyra Nichols and Nilas Martins; Rachel Rutherford and Jared Angle; Wendy Whelan and Nikolaj Hübbe) was also fine last night. There were two moments, both simple, that seemed to transcend everything and achieve the highest art; one was during the first part, in "Ein kleiner, hübscher Vogel," when the four couples waltz together on the shifting diagonal. The moment just shone, with dancers, singers, pianists, costumes and set—the whole thing—unified. The second was during the second part, in Whelan and Hübbe’s "Nein, Geliebter." Even in this cast, with Nichols and Kistler both strong presences, Whelan and Hübbe, particularly, stand out, because they are as a pair so committed to their roles. While this entire pas de deux is practically transcendently beautiful, there is a small, almost insignificant, moment when the two have finished a phrase at the end of the diagonal, and they are downstage left, both facing the corner, so she has her back to him. He waits a second and then proffers his hands to her, even though she hasn’t turned yet; and when she turns, finally, he is there waiting for her. It is small; but huge.

The pianists, Richard Moredock and Susan Walters, and the singers, Nancy Allen Lundy; Jennifer Rivera; Brian Anderson; and Jan Opalah, were no small reason why this performance was so good. While there were glitches (the tempi in the slow songs came close to being funereal; the pianists and the bass-baritone seemed unable to hear one another for "Ich kose süß mit der und der"), the songs were nonetheless mostly performed with an intensity to which the dancers responded, making for a real collaboration, rather than a contest.

The last ballet was Symphony in Three Movements, with Tiler Peck (substituting for Sterling Hyltin) and Tom Gold; Megan LeCrone and Adrian Danchig-Waring; and Wendy Whelan (substituting for Abi Stafford) and Albert Evans—a very strong cast. They, along with soloists and the corps, who are really this ballet’s backbone, did justice both to the great score and the great choreography. I was happy to see Whelan in her old part again, since she doesn’t seem to be doing this, along with Sanguinic and Symphony in C any more.

I always see different things in this ballet: this time I saw in the first movement a part that looked like it might be an allusion to Le Sacre du Printemps; if anyone knows about that, let me know.

New York City Ballet: A Brief Note

New York City Ballet
Saturday Matinee May 19, 2007
New York State Theater

"Family Fun"
Square Dance
Carousel (A Dance)
Symphony in C

Since I didn't see Romeo and Juliet, I hadn’t seen the company in two weeks and I was glad to catch the final performances of Square Dance and Symphony in C. Megan Fairchild’s dancing was less constrained than it often is in this role; Andrew Veyette was making a debut, and he did pretty well. He started the variation with some hesitation, but as he went along he became more connected to the music, and he used it to his advantage. His line isn’t ideal, especially in the feet, but his upper body is expressive. The corps, as usual, or maybe more than usual today, was terrific.

Wheeldon’s Carousel has grown on me, and it got very strong performances from Tiler Peck and Damian Woetzel, who projects a characterization that is very human and true.

A mishap I hadn’t seen before happened in Symphony in C. In the second movement, Sofiane Sylve was being partnered by Ask La Cour, in a debut, and when it came to the part where he lifts her and she puts her toe through the hoops created by the two soloist couples, somehow they undershot the lift, and poor Sylve actually had to lift her right leg and bend her foot into a very ugly position to lift it over the hoop-makers’ arms and into the center. It looked bad, but it was still kind of funny. It didn’t mar the entire performance, which was excellent, anyway. The rest of the cast: Scheller and Jonathan Stafford; Bouder and De Luz; Peck and Tyler Angle.

La Bayadère: Still Beautiful After All These Years

La Bayadère
American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House
May 17, 2007

I saw this Natalia Makarova version of Bayadère when it was brand new; I even got a chance to see the company rehearsing some of it in that now long-demolished building right off of Broadway (it was in that big studio right off the elevator, which you can see in The Turning Point, when Clark Tippet closes the door in Shirley McLaine’s face. And how can I not reference that film, when it uses the opening of the Shades scene to show not just what classical ballet is, but how beautiful and moving it can be?) So, much of this was swirling through my head at the performance at the Met last Thursday (thank you, Myra!), which I saw from a beautiful seat in the Dress Circle (that’s the third ring, for those of you who never leave the State Theater).

The production looks good; the sets and costumes are subtly colored, with very little clutter (thank goodness, given the plot). While the ballet may have a weak plot (two powerful men cause problems for two women, who then fight to the death over a third spineless man), the performance had a strong cast: Paloma Herrera was Nikiya, David Hallberg was Solor, and Gillian Murphy was Gamzatti.

What struck me as I watched the ballet (while in my mind’s eye watching a younger self watch the ballet), was the extent to which watching Balanchine has retrained my outward eye, to be always seeking structure. It is only once you get past the mime scenes and get, finally, in Act 1 scene 3, to the meat, to the Petipa, that you get that structure, and to the steps that flesh it out, steps that are pretty and inventive and strung together with skill and musicality. (Note the groupings: three groups of three in the background, with the main couple in the foreground; and the groupings shift and evolve and are in constant motion.)

But the real, and ultimately, maybe only, reason to see this ballet, is Act 2, the Kingdom of the Shades. And yes, it is still beautiful after all these years. As each corps member makes her entrance and steps into arabesque and begins the process of snaking around the stage, the restless stop rustling, the coughers stop coughing; all is serene and everything is beautiful at the ballet. The Minkus score is what it is; but I love it here, nonetheless. The corps got a huge hand, deservedly.

On the whole, the dancing was solid throughout. There was some clomping from the girls in the purple tutus in the Pas d’Action in the garden scene, but the girls in light blue did well, and the men here looked very strong (the sluggish tempo in this section probably wasn’t helping anyone).

Herrera can be a mystery; she is all feet, with a baroque line. Sometimes she seems to be afflicted with the same problem that can creep into Maria Kowroski’s performances, a seeming mental absence. In the first act, for example, when she comes out in that fetching red costume and dances with the fatal basket of flowers, she doesn’t seem to understand that she should be milking those steps; that she should be both seducing Solor as well as beseeching Gamzatti, both of whom are sitting at the end of the diagonal on which she dances. Whenever she turns her back on the audience and runs upstage, she loses any trace of characterization that she had created. She was much better in the Shades scene, where all she had to do was dance.

Murphy has a stronger presence as an actress as well as a bravura technique, and she doesn’t allow Gamzatti to become invisible. Hallberg, whom I last saw in The Green Table, a role of a slightly different virtuosity, has a solid, generous technique, and no annoying mannerisms. While this is positive, he might want to work on developing a stronger stage presence here. Unlike the role of Death, where much of that persona is created for him, here he is on his own, and too often there is not much there beyond some well-executed jumps and turns.

Other notable performances came from the three soloist shades, Sarah Lane, Yuriko Kajiya, and Melissa Thomas; Victor Barbee as the High Brahmin; and Gennadi Saveliev as the Radjah.