Saturday, March 7, 2020

Balanchine’s Shakespeare Comes to SFB

Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, George Balanchine’s choreographed interpretation of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream returned to the San Francisco Ballet (SFB) repertoire. Balanchine created this full-evening (two acts and six scenes) ballet for his New York City Ballet, which premiered it on January 17, 1962. SFB added it to repertoire on March 12, 1985.

Some readers may recall that, back in September of 2018, I wrote about a video document of Frederick Ashton’s “The Dream.” Ashton distilled Shakespeare’s play into a one-act ballet, about forty minutes in duration; and it was first performed by the Royal Ballet in London on April 2, 1964. The ballet was first seen in New York on April 20, 1965, when the Royal visited the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. The following year Balanchine worked with Richard Davis to provide a film account of his own ballet, performed by many of the members of the 1962 cast.

It should surprise no one that both Balanchine and Ashton turned to the music of Felix Mendelssohn for their respective ballets. John Lanchbery prepared an arrangement of the music Mendelssohn had composed for Shakespeare’s play (including the overture, Opus 21, which had been written long before the rest of the incidental music, Opus 61), all scaled to fit Ashton’s one-act conception. Balanchine, on the other hand, had to add to Mendelssohn’s overture and incidental music. He found additional Mendelssohn compositions to account for episodes not covered by either Opus 21 or Opus 61.

In addition, the second act basically moved Shakespeare into “Aurora’s Wedding” territory. As in the third act of Marius Petipa’s choreography for The Sleeping Beauty, there is an extended divertissement (without any dramatic connotations from, for example, fairy tale characters) followed by a marriage ceremony for the three couples: Theseus-Hippolyta, Lysander-Hermia, Demetrius-Helena. The act then concludes with Puck’s monologue with more action from the corps than from Puck himself. The divertissement is where one encounters much of the additional Mendelssohn music, none of which gets very much exposure in the concert hall.

From a dramatic point of view, Balanchine’s longer duration allows for more extended character development while, at the same time, keeping the stage busy with an extended corps of denizens (mostly supernatural) of a nocturnal wood. That extension goes all the way back to the youngest SFB School students, still too young to wear toe shoes. The overall impression is that the woods on a midsummer night are dark and full of the unexpected. It is thus no surprise that the first mortal we encounter is Helena (Mathilde Froustey) running through those woods, presumably in search of Demetrius (Ulrik Birkkjaer).

The reconciliation of Oberon (Joseph Walsh) and Titania (Yuan Yuan Tan) (photograph by Erik Tomasson, courtesy of SFB)

However, while Shakespeare devotes much of his attention to sorting out the amorous affairs of the two couples, the other two being Hermia (Dores André) and Lysander (Benjamin Freemantle), Balanchine tends to structure his version of the narrative around the conflict between Oberon (Joseph Walsh) and Titania (Yuan Yuan Tan) over the custody the changeling Indian boy. I suppose one could say that supernatural characters always lend themselves better to choreography! Indeed, among the mortal characters, the “rude mechanicals” are reduced to little more than Bottom (Alexandre Cagnat), whose scene with the donkey’s head is essential to Titania’s role in the plot.

Most important, however, was Balanchine’s skill at unfolding the plot at a brisk pace while consistently letting the essence of dance rise above the denotations of Shakespeare’s words. This is frequently the case when literary sources are sung, rather than read. Balanchine made it clear that dance could do justice to literature without being dragged down by the words themselves.

(Personal observation: There are any number of moments in Ashton’s “The Dream” when I hear Shakespeare’s words in my head; in watching Balanchine I found myself more focused on the narrative itself, rather than the poetry behind that narrative.)

On the musical side Conductor Martin West consistently found the right ways to present Mendelssohn’s music. As I have observed many times, sensitivity to rhetoric is just as important as a capable interpretation of the marks on score pages. West clearly appreciated Mendelssohn’s own rhetorical palette and always knew how to allow it to mesh with the rhetoric of Balanchine’s choreography.

The only weak point came with the vocal delivery of Shakespeare’s words by the women of Robert Geary’s Volti choral ensemble. While Mendelssohn may not have understood English very well, his settings of Shakespeare’s texts for the fairies are impressively effective. Unfortunately, the women had to sing from the orchestra pit. As result, while they have a reputation for impeccable diction in recital performances, even those listeners who knew Shakespeare’s words would have had a hard time discerning them last night. This was the one time in the entire evening when my knowledge of what should have been had to prevail over that of what actually was.

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