Two Old Masters, Partnered Perhaps With New Ones

<First published online in the New York Times on May 17, 2007>

To find any ballet that brings tears to the eyes is cause for celebration, but in New York City Ballet’s quadruple bill “Four Voices” I find two. Not that these are tearjerkers. If tears come at all here (and doubtless I am in a minority), then they do so in a spontaneous sense of emotional recognition. A feeling we have known in life is happening again onstage, writ large to music.

The final and oldest ballet of this program is George Balanchine’s “Sonnambula” (1946), currently in very good shape. The marvelous focal performance that makes the ballet seem so heart-stopping here is that of Nikolaj Hübbe as the Poet, Hoffmann-like in his ardent romantic thrall to one heroine and then to her opposite.

But it is good to see Darci Kistler, in the title role, opening herself to the rich sweep of the Rieti-Bellini score. This sleepwalking heroine has four of Bellini’s most moving melodies, and, when the hero is dead and she returns to mourn him, it was Ms. Kistler’s response to the last of these (“Ah, non credea”), that brought my tears on Tuesday.

Ms. Kistler first danced this role when the current production was revived 20 years ago. Today her main power is in her upper body, but here she uses that ardently, letting her head and shoulders turn and bend in the heroine’s sudden moments of unexpected emotion.

City Ballet takes justified pride in its legacies of Balanchine and Robbins ballets. The Robbins ballet on this program is “Moves” (1959), always self-conscious and unspontaneous in the sequences it sets to silence, yet still a striking example of Robbins’s sure theatricality: The eye and the mind are held fast. But where “Four Voices” scores further is in featuring dances by the two full-time ballet choreographers who, of any in the world today, are doing most to give new vigor to the genre: Alexei Ratmansky (the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet) and Christopher Wheeldon (the resident City Ballet choreographer since 2001, though now establishing his own company, Morphoses).

What’s remarkable about Mr. Ratmansky’s “Middle Duet,” compellingly set to a score by Yuri Khanon that evokes both Bach and the tango, is its brisk, quietly inexorable, motor rhythm. Maria Kowroski and Albert Evans, initially linked in tangolike proximity, dance keenly but as if in confined space, she twisting in his arms as if seeking escape, only at once to return to him. Familiar steps, like supported pirouettes, have surprise endings. And the big surprise is that the duet leads to death.

This duet was new last November; now Mr. Ratmansky has dared to add a pair of rival guardian angels — one dark, one white — and an ending that suggests life after death (in the form of a shadowy second couple). Which, amazingly, works because of the peculiarly cool way in which Mr. Ratmansky dramatizes it. Matters of transcendence here become matter of fact.

Mr. Wheeldon’s “Carousel (A Dance)” opens the program, and it is this marvelously eloquent pure-dance distillation of the opening scenes of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical (arranged into a suite by William David Brohn) that brought my other tears. The male loner at the center of the human carousel, the female loner outside it, conscious only of each other: Mr. Wheeldon catches this in his opening image.

The pas de deux for hero and heroine maintains a rare narrative propulsion. We watch the relationship change, and the heroine grow, with images that show her now strong, now sensual, now rapturous.

Watching this 2002 dance for the first time on Tuesday, I had not known Mr. Wheeldon capable of this kind of poetic characterization. When the deeply affecting Rodgers melody “If I Loved You” arrives (actually not dissimilar to Bellini’s “Ah, non credea” in its steady rise and fall), it is only right to cry, and to thrill to the current of feeling it releases.

Tiler Peck, one of City Ballet’s recent teenage Juliets, danced with Damien Woetzel — dropping backward into his arms, then walking on air in them — with just the dark intensity one would have hoped for after her “Romeo” appearance, focused upon her partner as if finding her destiny.

@New York Times 2007