City Ballet’s Greatest-Hit Makers Get Help From Some Old Masters
<First published online in the New York Times on January 5, 2008>
Does any other ballet company in the world come even close to New York City Ballet for the sheer quantity of repertory it presents? The first four weeks of its winter season introduce eight full programs, three of them starting this coming week. Balletgoers in most other cities of the world, wildly grateful if their local companies can open more than four programs in a single month, have long been justly envious.
The season’s second program, a quadruple bill called “Dance for Joy,” which opened on Thursday, is also a reminder that City Ballet also leads the world in sheer quality of repertory, even on nights such as this, with nothing by its founding master, George Balanchine. All the ballets were originally made for City Ballet too. Two of them are by Jerome Robbins, whose ability to create hit ballets sometimes rivaled Balanchine’s during their long and fruitful coexistence as choreographers for this ballet company; one bonne bouche is by Peter Martins, its balletmaster in chief; another is by its resident choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon.
Robbins’s “Concert” has often struck me as the most sheerly funny of all ballets; his “Brandenburg” is a masterly demonstration of just how finely he could create musically revealing, friendly dances. Mr. Martins’s “Zakouski,” an extended pas de deux planned as a selection of Russian hors d’oeuvres, exhibits charm of a practiced kind. And Mr. Wheeldon’s new company, Morphoses, would have been off to an altogether stronger start last fall if it had included anything like “Carousel” in its opening programs. Though the title “Dance for Joy” strikes the mark only intermittently, Thursday was a happy, if lightweight, evening.
The music was an excellent anthology (plenty of weight here), admirably conducted by Maurice Kaplow: Bach (one complete concerto and three movements from others) in “Brandenburg”; Rodgers (arranged and orchestrated by William David Brohn) in “Carousel”; Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky (played by Arturo Delmoni, on violin, and Richard Moredock, on piano) in “Zakouski”; and Chopin excerpts (led from the piano by Nancy McDill) in “The Concert.” City Ballet orchestra players rose with distinction to the interweaving solo opportunities of Bach’s “Brandenburg” writing.
So did the dancers onstage, winningly led by Ashley Bouder with Gonzalo Garcia, and Maria Kowroski with Philip Neal. “Brandenburg” (1997), one of the last ballets Robbins ever choreographed, abounds in stylistic and musical felicities. You could send any aspiring choreographer to study his dance account, for four couples, of the Menuetto-Polacca from the first Brandenburg concerto. Its opening phrases show men and women alternating in a hopping phrase that highlights the minuet rhythm; all the couples are given separate chances to shine in the music’s brighter outbursts; and there are fine touches of both symmetry and differentiation throughout.
Robbins’s choreography supplies a consistently attractive, occasionally too artful view of not-quite-adult grace and freshness. His flair for naïveté, spontaneity, charm and comedy often brings these things to the surface in Bach’s musical writing, revealingly.
There are also passages of darker eloquence, as in the Andante pas de deux for Ms. Kowroski and Mr. Neal, where these dancers often do not touch, even when she is following his lead, and where the changing distance between them (sometimes they travel along quite separate paths) always seems true to the score. It seems unfair, since it’s good to see how gracefully Robbins was working in the final phase of his creative life, to observe that he couldn’t resist choreographing more “Brandenburg” material than he knew how to shape into a single satisfying structure. The ballet leaves no strong aftertaste.
The dance world in general, and City Ballet in particular, is approaching the 10th anniversary of Robbins’s death (July 29). In its spring season City Ballet will present no fewer than 30 of his works. “Dance for Joy” raises this question: How did the inspired cartoon comedian of “The Concert” (1956) develop into the refined classical stylist of “Brandenburg”? And was this, in Robbins’s case, diminution rather than growth? Certainly in early works like “The Concert,” Robbins was less like other choreographers than he later chose to become. This is a true classic, full of jokes that you find yourself quoting in everyday life (different people raising and lowering their umbrellas in simultaneous reaction to one another rather than to the weather; the body slump when you see someone else wearing precisely the same carefully selected attire).
“The Concert” has been fresher than on Thursday, though. Perhaps many in the audience did not often laugh out loud because they, like myself, knew when the jokes were coming. But it is also true that at several moments performers were elaborating on old comic business that would have worked better with less contrivance.
A different lack of freshness was the problem with Mr. Martins’s “Zakouski.” This 1992 pas de deux is principally a vehicle for Nikolaj Hübbe, whose farewell to this company (on Feb. 10) looms all too soon, after which he will depart to take up new duties as artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet, his parent company.
“Zakouski” showcases many of the virtues for which Mr. Hübbe, a handsome dancer and an exemplary stylist, is rightly loved. His rich-toned elegance, virile allure and imaginative absorption are all in evidence here. This pas de deux, however, is a mere potpourri of familiar ballet effects. And Mr. Hübbe’s partner, Yvonne Borree, gives so sketchy, saccharine and wispy an account of its other role that you just can’t believe in it.
The “joy” of the program’s title was best felt in parts of its darkest ballet, Mr. Wheeldon’s “Carousel,” in particular in Tiler Peck’s performance as its heroine. Ms. Peck, returning to the stage after an injury, was a bright, hard technician who last spring revealed an unsuspected emotional intensity as Juliet in Mr. Martins’s “Romeo and Juliet.” In “Carousel,” building on that, she gives the program’s most affecting performance. Her partner, Damian Woetzel, already ideal as her rough-diamond partner, becomes doubly appealing, as seen through the burning intensity of Ms. Peck’s eyes. The fullness of her response to him becomes the subject of the ballet. Just a small, circling motion of her upper body as she faces him becomes a powerful psychological gesture, like a ripple spreading on a pool.
No single moment of Mr. Wheeldon’s “Carousel” is especially original, and parts of his ensemble choreography are too formulaic. (How many peeling diagonals can we take?) But here he creates a world, amid which the most pressingly real factor is Ms. Peck’s account of the heroine’s isolation and her ardent need for this male loner. I know no other Wheeldon work whose heroine has so vivid an inner life.
@New York Times, 2008