The ending of Frederick Ashton’s “Symphonic Variations”: a 1946 photograph.

The point of interest of this action photograph by Roger Wood is that it shows the final moment of Frederick Ashton’s Symphonic Variations, with the original 1946 cast. The three women have snapped back into the image of statuesque repose with which they began the ballet, but the leading man (Michael Somes) is suspended in the upward-and-forward gesture - implicitly bringing the spring to this seasons-inspired ballet - that he showed in his very first movements, after the womens’ chaste, wintry opening dance. And so the ballet ends with a double image of winter and spring, coming more than full cycle.

In this ballet where the six dancers never leave the stage, the lead male role is widely known as the most exhausting in all ballet, the more so as its style should remain limpid and Apollonian throughout. And yet Anthony Dowell regularly performed another ballet in a Symphonic Variations triple bill; I also remember him twice in autumn 1977 dancing three successive roles in the same programme: Troyte in Enigma Variations (a role - created for him in 1968 by Ashton - so stressful in dynamics that he needed to give himself a barre immediately after finishing it), the lead in Symphonic Variations, and the bridegroom’s foremost male companion in Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces (1923, a role in which Nijinska had coached him in 1966).

Left to right: Pamela May, Henry Danton, Margot Fonteyn, Michael Shearer, Michael Somes (gesturing). Out of view on the right is Brian Shaw (aged eighteen). The oldest member of the cast was May, then almost twenty-nine. Danton, the member of the cast of whom the company lost trace for some fifty years, sustained a distinguished career as a ballet teacher in the American South, and is still among us. Only when the other five had died did he make contact again with the ballet worlds of London and New York, by whom he has become much loved. This century, a composite, fragmentary film of long, colour takes of 1946 performances was found; a this documentary can be seen on YouTube in which Danton, on one of his then annual visits to London, comments on the differences between the ballet then and now. He celebrated his centennial in London, but has not been able to return here since then for pandemic reasons.

Saturday 4 September

1: 1946 photograph by Roger Wood of Frederick Ashton’s “Symphonic Variations”: the concluding image.

2: Detail of photograph 1, showing that suspended final gesture by Michael Somes at the end of an exhausting role. Moira Shearer is on the left in the foreground.