A New Season Begins with a Celebration of a Master - four Balanchine ballets, April 2007
Photograph: Kyra Nichols in George Balanchine’s “Pavane” (1975)
First published on line in the “New York Times” on April 26, 2007, this was my first true review for the newspaper. I had been in New York for over two weeks, but the editors wanted me to make my debut with a major event: in this case, the opening night of New York City Ballet’s spring season. AM.
Monday will be the 24th anniversary of the death of George Balanchine. For many dancegoers, the ending of a career so bountiful seemed the worst calamity to have befallen the art form since the death of Diaghilev in 1929. But far more Balanchine ballets are performed today than during his lifetime, by companies from San Francisco to St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, New York City Ballet preserves the main corpus of his choreography, while the School of American Ballet guards the flame of his academic teaching.
For this richer and livelier legacy than any that survived Diaghilev, we have one person to thank above all others: Lincoln Kirstein, the centenary of whose birth is commemorated by the New York City Ballet spring season, which opened on Tuesday night. Without Kirstein and his efforts to give Balanchine a custom-built company, we might have scarcely more ballets by Balanchine today than we do by Léonide Massine and Bronislava Nijinska, Balanchine’s immediate predecessors with the Diaghilev company. Without the institutions that Kirstein put at Balanchine’s disposal, principally City Ballet and its School of American Ballet, many a Balanchine masterpiece would surely have gone the way of his “Cotillon,” “Baiser de la Fée” <1> and “Balustrade” — ballets loved in their day but lost before City Ballet was founded.
It is fitting, therefore, and moving too, that the company starts this spring season with one all-Balanchine week: 10 ballets created from 1928 (“Apollo”) to 1975 (“Pavane”). None of them employ scenery; all employ major scores by composers from Bach and Corelli to Stravinsky, Ravel and Hindemith. And thereby all of them exemplify Balanchine’s most characteristic form of modernism, paring away all other matters to concentrate on the union of academic ballet and music, and building that into one castle in the air after another. Tuesday night’s program, well conducted by Fayçal Karoui, began with “The Four Temperaments” (1946), in which Balanchine’s pared-down conception of ballet became a brave-new-world breakthrough. Nothing here is more crucial than the basic transfer of weight. Starting with the weight on both legs, the dancer extends one leg into the air, then starts to transfer the body weight with the advancing foot well before it has reached the ground. (Here Balanchine caught something both jazzy and American, while offending the European sense of propriety.) The sense is of stepping out over a brink. Tuesday’s performance was on the demure side: often meticulous, almost always lucid, occasionally bold, but seldom powerful.
When people who have come to Balanchine choreography in the last 20 years ask me what makes me miss New York City Ballet in his lifetime (though I caught only the tail end of that golden age), I find myself saying that the company’s dancing in those days blazed with a kind of energy that was positively disturbing: it shook you by the shoulders as if to say, “This matters.” “The Four Temperaments” is one of many Balanchine ballets so extraordinary in their architecture and its conception that many new dance-goers must surely feel that they still matter now; I can only say it mattered more.
The same goes for two of Tuesday’s other ballets, “Agon” (1957) and “Symphony in C” (1947). Against the blue backdrop of “Symphony in C,” the curtain rises on the small corps of young women in their white tutus, all primed for ballet action, and the audience at once purrs in eager anticipation. As the ballet proceeds, there are moments that thrill at every performance: the way the horn call in the first movement brings on the ballet’s first man, the way the oboe in the second movement brings on the second ballerina, the astonishing views of the ballet’s massed forces in the finale, to name but a few. With “Agon,” the thrills are largely to do with the new extreme of modernist ballet style achieved by Balanchine in terms of physical lines, musical rhythms, jazzy/urban body language, all shot through with a constant sense of ballet’s centuries-old classical tradition.
These things don’t vary, and yet both ballets vary intensely according to how they are being danced. There will be much more to say of individual dancers as this season proceeds, but it is right to acknowledge the authority of two particular ballerinas: Wendy Whelan, and Maria Kowroski in the second movement of “Symphony in C.” Nobody can miss the severe, intelligent, proud distinction Ms. Whelan brings to the “Agon” pas de deux; however, I find the texture of her dancing too acidic to be agreeable. Ms. Kowroski doesn’t quite shape the great Bizet adagio into one coherent thought, but despite tentative moments, she lights up the role with a mixture of grandeur, fragrance and a fitfully romantic absorption. She was at her best in the famous alternation between backward falls and forward plunges into her partner’s arms, and in the off-balance luxuriance of her solo.
Unlike those three ballets, “Pavane” isn’t one of Balanchine’s great architectures. Here he conjures magic out of just a few sketchlike strokes. Dim lighting (too dim on Tuesday?); a single ballerina in a white dress; a square of soft white fabric that becomes, by turns, a shroud, a veil, an arc in the air, a prayer shawl, a heroic drape; and Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte.” With Kyra Nichols, however, this was the evening’s moment of truest poetry. This whole season is colored by melancholy, since this enthralling artist — surely the most bewilderingly diverse chameleon of all the Balanchine ballerinas — has announced her retirement at its end. How is it that, in “Pavane,” her remanipulation of that fabric becomes a major act of theatrical imagination? In one phrase, as she slowly advanced, placing her points with delicate decisiveness, I felt again that old reaction to the Balanchine experience: “This matters.” And while she dances, nothing else matters in the world.
@New York Times, 2007
As my friend Robert (Bob) Gottlieb was quick to observe, this was a mistake on my part. Balanchine staged his final (fourth) production of Le Baiser de la fée for New York City Ballet in 1950. It was dropped from repertory after two years. AM.