"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 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 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 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 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. - - - - 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... |