From Mr. Masterpiece, International Odds and Ends

<First published in the New York Times, June 1, 2007>

“When I die,” George Balanchine sometimes remarked, “everything masterpiece.” Twenty-four years after the death of this greatest of choreographers, it’s easy to forget that during his lifetime several of his ballets, like many major aspects of his dance style, were thoroughly controversial.

I can never forget how his “Union Jack” (1976) — a ballet that brilliantly considers the rituals of three institutions of British life (Scots and Canadian guard regiments on display, the music hall and the Royal Navy) — failed to please many in the audience when New York City Ballet danced it at Covent Garden in 1979. Likewise I have heard that “Bugaku” (1963), in which he adapted features of Japanese ceremony and behavior, deeply offended many Japanese observers.

Both these dances were on City Ballet’s new “International Balanchine” program on Wednesday night, along with the Russian-American “Serenade,” the ballet he made to Tchaikovsky music as his first on American soil (1934). My British blood and upbringing have never stopped me from loving “Union Jack.” The slow, stylized, massed marches alone with which it begins (I love the emphasis Balanchine gives to the feet and hips) are so tremendously theatrical that they give me goose bumps.

And the composer Hershy Kay probably did nothing better than his adaptation of tunes that many Britons have known since childhood, from “The Keel Row” and “Ye Banks and Braes” to “Colonel Bogey” and “Rule Britannia.” Thrilling to see it again (conducted with admirable panache by Nicolette Fraillon), nowhere more so than in the robustly old-pro comedy of Kyra Nichols as the Costermonger Queen.

“Union Jack” is a great closer, but is “Bugaku” a strong centerpiece? Even among Balanchine devotees, this depiction of Japanese male-female union in public and private has always had its detractors: its amalgam of japonaiserie, formality and overt sex has a distinctly limited fascination. I never saw the original cast (Allegra Kent with Edward Villella), and the best recent account I have seen was by the San Francisco Ballet in 2001. The City Ballet revival, a major improvement on performances I recall in 1988, features a luscious, rivetingly inscrutable account of the ballerina role by Maria Kowroski; but Albert Evans, as her partner, stays politely dull.

“Serenade,” which opens the evening and is firmly paced by Maurice Kaplow’s conducting, is Russian in its music and perhaps in some of the quasi-narrative episodes in its final Elegy, but it has always been American in the freedom with which its dancers cross space. This, the most beloved Balanchine work of all, is also the most structurally democratic ballet he ever made, with principals, soloists and corps all intermingling, and each corps girl commanding the space around her while sharing steps that are usually a star’s prerogative.

No ballet is more rewatchable. And yet I was miserable on Wednesday, seeing it dimmed by the central performance of Darci Kistler, her raised leg always sagging lower than her colleagues’ in ensemble, her energies never high, except perhaps in her winsomely precious head positions. My misery is greater because I so well recall this same Ms. Kistler, in her first solo role with this company (third movement, “Tschaikovsky Suite No 3,” in Paris in autumn 1980) transforming the choreography with her bright-day energy and sweet-breeze exuberance. Now, however, no dancer can ever have so gingerly, gradually, lowered herself to the floor in the famous fall at the end of the Tema Russo; and in the Elegy that follows she repeatedly spent time adjusting her hair.

How should the name of the composer of the music for “Serenade” be spelled? Most Westerners now spell it Tchaikovsky, but City Ballet took up, during Balanchine’s lifetime, the spelling Tschaikovsky. Why? Because that’s how the composer spelled it when he was in New York in 1891. (My thanks to the reader who sent me a copy of his Carnegie Hall autograph from the Pierpont Morgan Library.)

The “Tsch” spelling reminds me of Balanchine’s ballet “Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No 2,” and of the Sunday matinee performance in which — at the end of an entirely distinguished account of City Ballet’s “Three Masters” triple bill — young, small Ashley Bouder made her commanding debut in the leading role. Talk about energy! The technical demands of this part are staggering, yet Ms. Bouder etched every step burningly into the score, and at the end looked ready for more. Remarkably, she danced the ballet with a powerful overall sense of its architecture, shading its moods and finding its shadows. (I would not like her to stress its drama any more than she does now: she can afford to lighten up here and there.)

She dances it again tomorrow afternoon. An individual performance can stamp a whole season with present authority and future promise; and this has been the defining performance of City Ballet’s spring season to date.

@New York Times, 2007