Concettina Died and Other Stories of the East Side
PhotographsDownloadsLinksSelf-portraitContact


"Back to Ballet" posted January 27, 2005 at 09:14 PM

January brings with it not just snow, wind, and big city loneliness. January brings with it the return of repertory evenings at New York City Ballet.

January 5, 2005 / 8pm
City Ballet's second night of the season was my first. Paula and I both had rotten, stressful days that day--not as bad, however, as Aidan's day, as he was diagnosed with pneumonia. His waterlogging was our benefit, as I collected his tickets for him at 7.45 and Paula and I took our house seats in the middle of row N. Three wonderful ballets washed over us. Balanchine's Ballo della Regina came first, with my friend Benjamin Millepied dancing the lead with Ashley Bouder. I've always loved this ballet and it was great to see two of the younger dancers dancing it. Though I should note that Benjamin--in all the best ways--is not as young as he used to be: it struck both Paula and me that here was Benjamin, a man. He had always been a boy, but suddenly (well, okay, he's 27, it didn't happen suddenly) his body looks like a man--strong and filled out. He's come into his own in terms of dancing--he's balanced, he never overacts, and he dances with great authority.

Stabat Mater came next. This is a Peter Martins ballet set to Pergolesi's most famous and most heavenly work, which features a soprano and a countertenor (make sure it's on your iPod when you visit the Sistine Chapel!). I feel that Martins's ballets are hit or miss, but this one is a definite hit. The up-and-back lifts are gorgeous, the girls look like the 17th century terra cotta angels that fly forth from the Metropolitan Museum's Christmas tree every year.

Finally, we saw Balanchine's Cortege Hongrois--a perfect example of Balanchine creating something that is extremely entertaining on the surface, and injecting it with so much discipline and so much originality that it also stands as great art.

January 19, 2005 / 8pm
This is a night I have been waiting for five years: the return of Jerome Robbins's The Goldberg Variations. Set to Bach's keyboard masterpiece, this is one of the ballets that first hooked me on ballet. It's very long, but not long enough. One of the great benefits of going to the ballet by myself is that I buy tickets just before the performance and--since I'm just buying just one--almost always end up with a perfect seat right in the the best seats of the orchestra section. On this night I ended up right in the middle of the very first row. I am not a religious person at all, but I swear when the pianist Cameron Grant played the first notes, and when the curtain went up 16 bars later, I wanted to cross myself and say five Hail Marys. The cast was just great--particularly Jared Angle, Ashley Bouder, Janie Taylor, Joaquin de Luz, and Wendy Whelan.

The thing about Goldberg that astounds me is that Robbins keeps up with Bach. In this performance I was stunned to see steps and combinations that still surprised me with their ingenuity and beauty, even though I've seen this ballet many many times before. The same thing happens to me when I listen to the music on its own--it comforts me with the familiar, and it surprises me with continued depth and nuance revealed to me over time.

The second ballet on the program was one I had no interest in, so when intermission arrived for everyone else, for me it was the end of the night. I took the subway home bewildered in the thought that art could be so grand, so well-developed, and so moving.

January 20, 2005 / 7:30pm
Second night of Goldberg this season for NYCB, second night for me. This time I was in the middle of the second row. I was surrounded by ballet fans who were as enthusiastic about Goldberg as I was, and there was a lot of talk among us strangers about how much we'd missed it in the last five years, whether we'd been at last night's performance, who our favorite dancers were, which NYCB pianist we preferred, etc.

This was the best of the three performances I've seen of it this season (see below for the third). Every part of the performance was perfect--fluid, perfectly-timed dancing and an intuitive energetic response from the audience. This is a ballet where it really helps if you know the music before you sit down. Because it runs for almost 90 minutes with no break, if you know where you are in the overall structure of the music you never feel you have to decipher the structure of the ballet. And the ballet is superbly structured. This performance renewed my awe and admiration for Robbins's ability to take something abstract and turn it into theater, complete with introduction, development, acceleration of the pacing, a blossoming process that starts slowly then goes to full-flower just before a slight diminishment and quick closure. The ballet does not follow the music's structure--it imposes it's own. Robbins breaks the piece into Part 1 and Part II. When the first half--which features soloist dancers--ends, the ballet begins anew with Part II, this time featuring principle dancers. A whole new cast dances the the second half of the ballet. This is surely one of the reasons the ballet works so well.

This time, I did stay for the second ballet. Balanchine's Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3. Last fall, jonesing for ballet, I went to see American Ballet Theatre at City Center, where I saw them perform Theme and Variations, which is the last movement of this suite. I wrote at the time about the difference of seeing the grand procession at the ballet's end on the small City Center stage versus the larger stage of the State Theater. In this NYCB performance I noticed this again, and am hard pressed to decide which I prefer. Certainly, I prefer the City Ballet dancers--less fuss and bother to them, more speed--but there was something in the artifice of the ABT staging that was really winning.

January 25, 2005 / 8pm
Another night, another Goldberg. Amen. Watching this performance from the middle of the third row, I realized for the first time why Robbins's choreography accomplishes as much as Bach's music. Bach's sequence is not a typical theme and variations where the melody is ornamented and reworked with each passing variation. Instead, the theme is in the harmonic structure of the base line, and that is repeated and augmented through each variation. This is what it says in my copy of the Goldberg score (Schirmer’s Library of Musical Classics, Vol. 1980: J.S. Bach, The “Goldberg” Variations, Ralph Kirkpatrick, ed.):

II. FORM

Like an enormous passacaglia, these variations reiterate the harmonic implications of the same bass in thirty different forms. This fundamental bass is never stated entirely in it most elemental form, as quoted here (Ex. 1), not even in the Aria. But on this harmonic skeleton and around it are constructed the variations, each highly organized and composed of independent thematic material. These follow one another in a symmetrical grouping like the beads of a rosary.

Ex1.jpg

- - - -
Watching this past Tuesday, I finally saw that Robbins seems to have made many of these dances directly onto the structure of the bass line of the music. Not in every case, but in many of the most important variations--the last grand pas de deux (Variation #25) for example--it is clear that the steps are in rhythm with the bass, and not with the music's melody.

This performance was followed by Balanchine's Agon, beautifully danced by Wendy Whelan. I've written about this before, so, that's enough.

Tomorrow night? Ha! The fourth of the four Goldberg performances of the season. But yeah, they're doing it again Spring season--so come visit me and we'll go see it together...


Comments (1)