Legends of Life and Art, Stravinsky and Balanchine
<First published online in the New York Times on May 21, 2007>
If wealth of choreography is your main criterion, New York City Ballet should be the envy of the world this spring. By any standard except perhaps its own, the density with which it keeps adding ballets to its repertory is staggering.
If City Ballet were merely quantitatively impressive, then perhaps no fuss need be made. But this spring, thanks to the “Kirstein 100” tribute (honoring the centenary of the company’s co-founder, Lincoln Kirstein), the quality of choreography is unmatchable. The second City Ballet program last week was its Tchaikovsky triple bill, two by George Balanchine, one by Jerome Robbins; the third was its Stravinsky-Balanchine “Greek” trilogy, which is a key part of City Ballet’s tradition of modernist classicism (and classic modernism): “Apollo” (1928), “Orpheus” (1948) and “Agon” (1957).
Each of these ballets concerns the connection of life and art. In “Apollo,” the young title character, discovering music and its companion arts, becomes an artist and a true god. In “Orpheus” music is the transcendent thread, leading the artist through more deaths than one. But in “Agon” life and art are part of a bewilderingly modern collage, with unprecedented novelties of dance classicism and complex echoes of past genres of music and dance, flowering amid behavior that looks casual now and music that sometimes sounds like New York traffic.
Friday night’s performance — like several others this season — had two heroes: the conductor Fayçal Karoui and the dancer Nikolaj Hübbe. Mr. Karoui, after more than one weak predecessor, is finally restoring the tempos and discipline of the City Ballet orchestra to something approaching the high level of accomplishment it had under Robert Irving and Hugo Fiorato in Balanchine’s lifetime.
To see Mr. Hübbe’s Apollo three weeks after a performance of the role by Nilas Martins was to bring to mind Goneril’s sigh: “O the difference of man and man!” I’ve been watching Mr. Martins in solo roles since 1988, and not once have I seen him show the basic soloist gift of individuality or purposefulness. At best, as in that Apollo, he gives a connect-the-dots performance in which you see the shape of the role but none of its inner life. At worst, as when he played Orpheus on Friday, he’s a blank.
Mr. Hübbe, surely the finest Apollo since Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ib Andersen, brings the same handsomely sculptural qualities to the role that so distinguished Peter Martins’s account: alongside musical freshness, just the right hint of rawness and a kind of visionary ardor. Too bad that Yvonne Borree’s perky Terpsichore is so featherweight, but Megan Fairchild’s Calliope has telling classical rhythm, and Ashley Bouder’s Polyhymnia, lyrically incisive, shows the easy brightness that now makes me impatient to see her in many roles.
“Orpheus” is always honored because of its score and because, when young, its novel theatrical luster led directly to the creation of City Ballet. Whether it has had much luster at any time in the last 30 years is another matter. I was grateful Friday for the sheer drive of Wendy Whelan as Eurydice, but the male roles have never looked less alive in my experience.
Several performances were new to me in “Agon”: notably Maria Kowroski’s in the pas de deux and Sean Suozzi’s in the first pas de trois. Ms. Kowroski brings to this duet a connective dramatic impetus, a blithely spontaneous combustion, that it hasn’t had since Suzanne Farrell. Mr. Suozzi makes all the dancerly contrasts and transitions in his Sarabande solo appealing; here he looks even younger than in his recent Romeo.
In the great Bransle Gay solo of the second pas de trois Teresa Reichlen could be more pointed rhythmically and show flashes of greater force, but required to dance on two rhythms at the same time, she dances as if on top of the world.
@New York Times, 2007