One Composer, Two Choreographers, Three Geniuses

<First published online in the New York Times May 19, 2007>

I cherish an old cartoon that depicts an all-Tchaikovsky concert at which cygnets (“Swan Lake,” of course) are being thwacked by cannonballs (the “1812 Overture”). A Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Hits evening will always draw. But what makes New York City Ballet’s new program, “Three Masters — Tschaikovsky, Balanchine, Robbins,” fascinating (yes, City Ballet spells the composer’s name with an “s,” as in “Tsch ... You know who”) is that it’s a strong triple bill made up of works that, except among balletgoers, aren’t among the composer’s best known or most generally admired.

Open your heart to the music — not hard on Thursday night, with these ballets and with Fayçal Karoui’s conducting and the pianists Susan Walters and Cameron Grant. Even if these works are familiar, you come away with a larger and more diverse view of this always life-enhancing composer.

Something all three ballets reveal is that Tch ... (or Tsch...), even in his most intimate piano music, is instinctively theatrical. When I’m listening at home, I like his fourth orchestral suite, “Mozartiana,” less than the four original Mozart pieces here that Tchaikovsky arranged for orchestra, especially the Theme and Variations finale (where Mozart is playing brilliantly with a theme sung in a once-popular Gluck opera, “Les Pélérins de la Mecque,” by the Muslim character Osmin). Some of Tchaikovsky’s orchestrations seem excessive, impure.

In the theater, however, even his most extreme effects of percussion fall into perfect proportion. And what’s extraordinary about George Balanchine’s 1981 “Mozartiana” ballet is how often he seems to set dance against sound, sometimes putting in effects of canon or cadenza where the music hasn’t (but will soon). In consequence, mysteriously, you both watch and hear better. The theatrical excitement keeps mounting, the choreography’s wit keeps shifting, and the audience finds itself applauding each variation on the theme.

The ballerina Wendy Whelan is on this music, so that some of its sheer timing strikes home, but not in it. This especially leaves a gap in the spacious flow of the opening Preghiera invocation, but also in the immense contrasts of scale of the fifth variation, which passes without the luxurious tension that can make it hair-raising. But Philip Neal’s bright legwork catches much of the music’s brio as her cavalier, and it’s good to see Daniel Ulbricht (a recent Mercutio) alert to the nimble elegance of the Gigue.

This “Mozartiana” (Balanchine had choreographed earlier versions in the 1930s) had its premiere in City Ballet’s 1981 Tchaikovsky Festival. So did “Piano Pieces,” which was one of Jerome Robbins’s characteristic anthologies of piano solos from a variety of sources: in this case spanning the composer’s Opus 1, No. 1, through Opus 72, No. 4 (published in his final year). Robbins’s theatrical response to these items seems slim in construction, strong on charm. Jennie Somogyi and Abi Stafford are blithe within this framework, as is Joaquin De Luz. And Jenifer Ringer, with lingering phrases and sudden brandishings, beautifully draws the audience into the ballet’s most compelling dances.

“Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2” comes from 40 years earlier and is the oldest example of Balanchine taking a score by this composer that had seemed minor, as if to say, “No — this is major.” By the end of the first pure-dance movement alone, we’ve had a richer, more dramatic experience than most three-act ballets ever afford. By the end of the third movement, borne above all by the exuberance of the female corps de ballet, we’re at once deep in poetic drama — the court, the isolated heroine, the searching cavalier, the guardian angel, all playing off one another in multiple refractions — and high in gala mood. (Balanchine gives the corps one of his most exhilarating against-the-music effects when the partners seem to hurl the dancers away with next to no aural support.)

In the prima role, Sofiane Sylve at first overemphasizes the static aspects, and seems stylistically too heavy, but by the finale the generosity of her dancing becomes exemplary: throwing herself into the music and eating up space. Jonathan Stafford, making his debut as her partner, touches on the part’s heroism, both in chivalrous partnering and his expansive solo.

Best of all is Teresa Reichlen in the second ballerina role, dewily youthful even while pouncing playfully on the part’s dynamic contrasts. Her footwork and the pianist’s hands are as one.

@New York Times, 2007