Is the Balanchine Legacy Going Stale?

During my graduate student years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I would take breaks by going down to New York to see performances by the New York City Ballet. This was back in the days when George Balanchine was still in charge, and I was consistently hooked on the ways that he could take concert music as repurpose it for his choreography. He had a particular interest in the Baroque period; and, while the  performance of the music coming out of the orchestra pit was seldom (if ever) “historically informed,” the choreography always seemed to find the right imaginative structures to go with compositions by the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach, Arcangelo Corelli, and Antonio Vivaldi.

Indeed, the last two of them provided the source material for one of Balanchine’s most interesting undertakings, “Square Dance.” The choreography was set to a collection of movements extracted from their compositions. In Balanchine’s New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, the author observed that the music “was of course derived from old folk dance forms and rhythms that were later refined for the courts of Europe.”

That said, it is worth noting that, when “Square Dance” was first performed, the staging could not have been more literal. While the structure of the choreography may have been organized around Baroque music, Balanchine recruited Elisha C. Keeler, described in Complete Stories as “the famous square dance caller,” to call the steps drawing upon the texts he would invoke for any other square dance. Sadly, by the time I had an opportunity to see this piece performed, Keeler was no longer a participant. Mind you, I took that adverb in the last sentence very seriously because a square dance really is not a square dance without a caller!

An example of the “geometric” choreography of “Concerto Barocco” (photograph by Ewa Krasucka, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

In other words, “Square Dance” is now just another ballet in which the performers dance to Baroque music. Put another way, it is little more than a revamping of one of Balanchine’s earliest creations, “Concerto Barocco.” True to its title, that earlier ballet was set to Bach’s BWV 1043 concerto for two violins and strings in D minor. It would be fair to say that just about any serious music lover knows this concerto, and I suspect that this would also have been the case when music lovers in the audience saw “Concerto Barocco” for the first time. As it is now performed, “Square Dance” is basically “‘Concerto Barocco’ redux;” and to be quite frank personally, I am much happier with choreography that follows a single coherent composition, rather than one that is a pastiche of multiple movements from multiple composers!

George Balanchine’s “Serenade” Sustains

The critical moment when the “newcomer” joins the other dancers at the conclusion of George Balanchine’s choreography of the first movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 48, the “Serenade for Strings” in the key of C major (from the Great Performances video of New York City Ballet in Madrid)

Once again I find myself waxing lyrical over “Serenade,” the first ballet that George Balanchine created in the United States. This was his first major effort after his move to the United States. It was first performed by students of his School of American Ballet. The venue was not in New York City. Rather, the premiere took place on the estate of Felix M. Warburg in White Plains on June 9, 1934. By the end of that year, the School had a producing company; and the first public performance was held in the Avery Memorial Theatre in Hartford, Connecticut.

It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that the choreography for “Serenade” spread like wildfire to schools of ballet and performing companies associated with them. The venues included San Francisco, and I have lost count of the number of times I have seen it performed on Public Television (PBS). It was also one of the ballets that sustained me through the pandemic during the “Digital Spring Season” of the New York City Ballet.

The most recent Great Performances broadcast of “Serenade” on PBS will discontinue streaming at the end of this month. The abstract classicism of this ballet was coupled with the “earthier” “Square Dance” (originally performed with a caller) for the full video program. In many ways this program couples the Russian tradition with American “folk roots.” Nevertheless, Balanchine provided the choreography for both of these works; and the visual experience continues to be consistently engaging. The program has the usual 90-minute duration; and there would be much to be gained from finding an available 90-minute slot prior to midnight!

Anna Gourari Links Schnittke to Hindemith

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Around the middle of this month, ECM New Series released its first album of pianist Anna Gourari performing with an orchestra. She had previously released three solo albums, so this new release offered a new perspective for those following her work. She performed two twentieth-century compositions with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Markus Poschner. As of this writing, the album is available for MP3 download from an Amazon.com Web page; and the Web page for the CD is taking pre-orders for a release date of August 2.

The album begins with the more recent of these works, Alfred Schnittke’s 1979 concerto for piano and string orchestra, a single track with a duration somewhat short of 25 minutes. It concludes with “The Four Temperaments,” a composition by Paul Hindemith given also the more abstract title “Theme and Four Variations.” The music was commissioned by George Balanchine, and the resulting ballet is known only by the “Four Temperaments” title. Between these two performances is an orchestral account of Hindemith’s “Symphony: Mathis der Maler.” The subtitle is that of an opera Hindemith had been planning about the painter Matthias Grünewald, and thematic material from the symphony eventually found its way into that opera.

There is an old joke about the monorail being an idea of the future whose time had passed. In his youth Hindemith was an adventurous (and occasionally raucous) composer. As might be guessed, the Nazis dismissed his work as “degenerate;” and he was wise enough to leave Germany before it was too late. He eventually found his way to the United States, where he became a member of the Music faculty at Yale University. By that time his interest in the past seemed to have taken the lead over his more adventurous side. However, that shift had already begun when he was working on his symphony in 1934 and was just as evident in the ballet score. (Where Balanchine was concerned, Hindemith’s music was a far cry from what Igor Stravinsky was providing him.)

In that context, anyone listening to this new album is likely to find the Hindemith selections to be a trip down memory lane. For my part, those are good memories; but I doubt that I shall visit them very frequently! Schnittke, on the other hand, first became an “item” during the last quarter of the last century, due primarily to a generous number of releases of his music by BIS. Most of these were ambitiously thorny, interspersed, occasionally, with ironic (if not sarcastic) reflections on the “old style.” If Noël Coward was best known for his “talent to amuse,” Schnittke seemed determined to establish a talent to provoke; and there is no shortage of provocations in his concerto. One might even think of the “Concerto for Piano vs. Orchestra;” but P. D. Q. Bach was definitely funnier!

Some readers may recall my fondness for the joke that the monorail was “an idea of the future whose time had passed;” and, while I cannot argue with the skilled techniques of the performers on this new album, I fear that both Hindemith and Schnittke have become targets of that joke.

SFB will Revisit Three Next@90 Ballets

Parker Garrison (rear) and Myles Thatcher in “MADCAP” (© RJ Muna for San Francisco Ballet)

The San Francisco Ballet will begin next month with a program of encore performances of three of the works given world premiere performances last season during the next@90 festival. One of those offerings will be Yuri Possokhov’s “Violin Concerto.” He described his effort as bring “fresh eyes” to George Balanchine’s “Stravinsky Violin Concerto;” and I came away from seeing this new work performed in January of last year with nothing but positive feelings about the choreographer’s distinctive merits. Next month’s program will also include one of the other ballets premiered on that January program, Nicolas Blanc’s “Gateway to the Sun.” The third work on the program will be Danielle Rowe’s “MADCAP,” setting carnival-inspired music by Pär Hagström orchestrated by Philip Feeney.

Like the other program that will be presented this month, this “revival” program will be given seven performances with dates and times as follows:

• Tuesday, April 2, 7:30 p.m.
• Wednesday, April 3, 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, April 5, 7:30 p.m.
• Sunday, April 7, 2 p.m.
• Thursday, April 11, 7:30 p.m.
• Saturday, April 12, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.

All performances will take place in the War Memorial Opera House, which is on the northwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and Grove Street (across MTT Way from Davies Symphony Hall). Ticket prices start at $29, and a single Web page has been created for purchasing tickets for all of the above dates and times. Tickets may also be purchased at the Box Office in the outer lobby of the Opera House or by calling 415-865-2000. The Box Office is open for ticket sales Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Balanchine Takes it on the Chin

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, this time, hopefully, for a full run of eleven performances. Readers may recall that, all but the first of the performances scheduled for the spring of 2020 had to be cancelled due to COVID. Since that time, there have been major changes in repertoire under the new leadership of Artistic Director Tamara Rojo. Sadly, the traditions of the repertoire of major twentieth-century choreographers, such as Balanchine, have not fared particularly well (Frederick Ashton having been the most recent casualty); and last night was a particularly disappointing experience.

The entire evening could be distilled down to a single adjective: boring. The entire first act, which Balanchine conceived as a distillation of the entire Shakespeare play, plodded its way from episode to episode, bringing to mind little more than that one-damned-thing-after-another epithet. Mind you, much of the time is spent with corps de ballet of fairies, who had little to bring to the narrative; but even those ensemble pieces lacked any sense of fresh energy (let alone the ephemeral nature of the characters they were intended to portray). Where the characters themselves were concerned, particularly the twists and turns of the “love quadrangle” was little more than muddle, while the tension between Titania and Oberon was flimsy, and Puck’s intrusions tediously offered little. Only Bottom’s ass-head engagement with Titania allowed for a giggle or two.

The divertissement for the second act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the corps led by Frances Chung and Angelo Greco (© The Balanchine Trust, photograph © Chris Hardy)

For those unfamiliar with this ballet, the second act departs from Shakespeare to provide an “entertainment” for the wedding celebration. This basically took the form of a multi-movement divertissement, drawing upon works by Felix Mendelssohn to supplement the music he had composed for the Shakespeare play. However, as had been the case with the fairies in the first act, the dancing came across as little more than routine (an adjective that would never have been applied to Balanchine when he was in charge of the New York City Ballet). The result was, in the immortal words of Dorothy Fields, “as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes.”

Balanchine’s Shakespeare Returns to SFB

Daniel Delvison-Olivera and Jennifer Stahl with the SFB corps de ballet during Act II of George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (choreography by George Balanchine ©The Balanchine Trust, photograph ©Chris Hardy, courtesy of SFB)

The last plan to revive George Balanchine’s full-length ballet A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the San Francisco Ballet (SFB) was a quickly frustrated endeavor. During the intermission of the opening night performance on March 6, 2020, leaflets were handed out to mark the beginning of lockdown conditions in response to the threat of the COVID-19 virus. Next month SFB will make up for that foreshortened occasion with a run of eleven performances of the ballet between March 12 and March 23.

Those (like myself) that attended the only 2020 performance may wish to return. The production will feature new sets and costumes conceived by the iconic French designer Christian Lacroix, who will be making his North American debut in that capacity. This “new and improved” offering will be given eleven performances with dates and times as follows:

• Tuesday, March 12, 7:30 p.m.
• Wednesday, March 13, 7:30 p.m.
• Thursday, March 14, 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, March 15, 8 p.m.
• Saturday, March 16, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.
• Sunday, March 17, 2 p.m.
• Thursday, March 21, 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, March 22, 8 p.m.
• Saturday, March 23, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.

In the immortal words of Bullwinkle J. Moose, “This time fer sure!”

All performances will take place in the War Memorial Opera House, which is on the northwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and Grove Street (across MTT Way from Davies Symphony Hall). Ticket prices start at $29, and a single Web page has been created for purchasing tickets for all of the above dates and times. Tickets may also be purchased at the Box Office in the outer lobby of the Opera House or by calling 415-865-2000. The Box Office is open for ticket sales Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Does Balanchine Now Belong to the Past?

This morning I used my lunch break to catch up on the PBS broadcast of performances by the New York City Ballet (NYCB) in Madrid. The program consisted of two early works by George Balanchine and a significantly later one by Justin Peck, which was so much of a departure from the first half of the program that it did not take me long to bail on it. The Balanchine selections were “Serenade” and “Square Dance.” While both of them provided a solid reminder of Balanchine’s meticulous attention to music, I have to say that both of the performances came across as a relatively inadequate account of present-day dancers to evoke the spirit of Balanchine’s creativity during the middle of the twentieth century.

For those that do not already know, “Serenade” was the first ballet that Balanchine created after moving from Europe to New York. The dancers were students at the School of American Ballet. The ballet was first performed in 1934, a time when the very idea of a professional ballet company was little more than a consummation devoutly to be wished.

An example of the “geometry” of Balanchine’s choreography (screen shot from the YouTube video being discussed)

While Balanchine had some very strong ideas as to how choreography could reflect the abstract structures in Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 48 four-movement serenade for string orchestra, he was also smart enough to work with the relatively inadequate materials available to him. This was particularly evident when, while working on the Allegro con spirito tempo of the final movement, one of his dancers collapsed from exhaustion. In the language of my fellow students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Balanchine immediately recognized that this was a feature, rather than a bug. Thus, what Tchaikovksy had composed for the Finale of his serenade become the penultimate movement of Balanchine’s choreography, which concluded with the poignant “Elegie,” which had been the third of the four movements in Tchaikovksy’s score.

The good news is that this highly emotional response to an abstract scenario carried the same impact that made “Serenade” one of the most powerful works in the NYCB repertoire when Balanchine was in charge. It did not matter how many times one saw this ballet, whether in New York or when it had been “exported” to another ballet company. The circumstances leading up to that “Elegie” and the narrative that responds to those circumstances remain some of the most powerful examples of what the “modern ballet” of the last century could achieve. Even when now danced by a corps whose members had not been born when “Serenade” was first created, the ballet continues to sustain a gut-wrenching impact, even for those that have not perviously seen any Balanchine choreography.

“Square Dance” did not enter the repertoire until 1957, over twenty years after the creation of “Serenade.” Nevertheless, like its predecessor, it is a ballet that Balanchine created in reflection on his selection of musical composition, drawing entirely on works by Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi. Nevertheless, the title of the ballet was no mere gratuitous gesture. While the strings in the orchestra pit were churning away at challenging virtuoso passages, Elisha C. Keeler was on  stage serving as the square dance caller, drawing upon American style to cue the performance to music from the Italian Baroque period.

Sadly, there was no caller for the performance in Madrid which was subsequently broadcast on PBS. I suspect that one problem was that finding an authentic square dancer willing to work with Balanchine musical selections would not have been an easy matter; and, had a caller been recruited, the Madrid audience would probably not know what to make of him (or her). The down-side to this approach to “Square Dance” is that the spirit of that particular dance form has been all but obliterated. Instead, one views a ballet setting music by Corelli and Vivaldi that seems to be following in the steps of music by Tchaikovsky. The very idea of a square dance is left to the viewers to scratch their respective heads.

As I wrote at the beginning of this article, I passed on Peck’s choreography when, after only a few minutes, I realized that, when compared with Balanchine, he had nothing to say. What I fear, however, is that there is a chemistry about Peck’s work that “speaks” to his audience in ways that Balanchine’s tradition no longer does. This program was yet another reminder that the NYCB legacy of my approach to the performance of ballet is a far cry from the ways in which those sharing the audience with me tend to think. Thus, if I am accused of being too rooted to the past, I can only reply, “Guilty as charged.” Nevertheless, I would rather live with that guilt triggered by past experience than endure most (if not all) of the present-day alternatives.

The Mathematician’s Ballet

After having kept the book on a shelf for far too long, over the last several months I have been working my way through Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans. This effort was probably motivated by the recent appearance of Homans’ second book, which is devoted entirely to George Balanchine. It would be fair to cite Balanchine as the  pioneering force in the development of American ballet, distinguishing it clearly from much of European ballet tradition. For the most part, Apollo’s Angels has made for a consistently enjoyable reading experience; but things became interesting for me when the timeline arrived at Balanchine’s achievements. Reading Homans evoked distant memories of the period when I took out my first subscription to New York City Ballet (NYCB) performances in Lincoln Center.

At that time I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in mathematics and taking as many electives as I could manage in music courses. As I have previously observed on this site, my spare time (such as its was) was spent working at the campus radio station, devoting much of my time to programming twentieth-century music. As might be guessed, the mathematician in me was particularly drawn to techniques pursued by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern that involved permutations of pitch classes, leading eventually to what became known as the twelve-tone technique.

In that context I became totally hooked on Igor Stravinsky’s “Agon,” which he composed for a Balanchine ballet with the same title. For the better part of his life, Stravinsky wanted nothing to do with Schoenberg. However, after Schoenberg’s death, Stravinsky took an interest in atonal technique, possibly as a result of the influences of Robert Craft.

“Agon” fascinated me for the ways in which atonality rubbed shoulders with tonal traditions, traditions that, in this case, reflected back to the seventeenth century of René Descartes, Étienne Pascal, and particularly Marin Mersenne, whose Harmonie universelle treatise was published in 1636. It was the bold rhetoric of “Agon” than convinced me that I had to see how Balanchine had created a ballet for it. So it was that I began following Balanchine’s choreography both at Lincoln Center and in works that were performed by the Boston Ballet.

Thus, after about 500 pages of reading, I found myself scribbling no end of marginal notes when Homans wrote about “Agon.” She cited the ballet as the third part of a “Greek trilogy” of Balanchine working with Stravinsky’s music. The first two ballets, “Apollo” and “Orpheus,” were grounded in familiar narratives. In sharp contrast, “Agon” was inspired by a seventeenth-century treatise on the dance. What was important, however, was that such dances were intended for “recreational activities” taking place in the setting of a royal court; they were not created to present narratives.

In that context “Agon” had less to do with ancient myths and drew, instead, upon Balanchine’s abstract approach to Paul Hindemith’s composition for piano and strings involving a theme with four variations, given the subtitle “The Four Temperaments.” Balanchine’s choreography realized each of the dispositions associated with those variations (melancholy, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric). However, there was also an underlying “vocabulary” for the entire ballet; and all of the elements of that vocabulary were assembled into the choreographic interpretation of Hindemith’s coda. As a result, it was no surprise to me to observe that the choreography for “Agon” also wraps up with a coda that reflects on the opening measures of Stravinsky’s score.

All this should reflect back on the thoughts about “Agon” that I documented back in June of 2020 when, due to pandemic conditions, I had turned to YouTube when I was unable to attend “physical” performances. At that time I had discovered that John Clifford had uploaded digitizations of films of NYCB performances. The “Agon” film had no end of technical shortcomings; but I made it a point to cite “the rich interplay of abstraction and expressiveness.”

Because of the close partnership between Balanchine and Stravinsky, one could appreciate the many intricacies of abstraction based on how Balanchine chose to interpret Stravinsky’s music. At the same time there is an underlying foundation of expressiveness coming from all of the dancers, reflecting not so much on Stravinsky’s music as on a rich understanding of what it means to bring Balanchine’s choreography to life through the act of performance. From my own point of view, I feel that mathematics provided me with a platform on which I could grasp the elements of of abstraction; and those elements, in turn, provided a second platform from which I could view the “parallel” elements of expressiveness.

This may well be the only setting in which mathematics can serve as a prerequisite for appreciating a ballet!

Tamara Rojo Announces SFB 2024 Season

Next year will see the first San Francisco Ballet (SFB) season to be curated by Artistic Director Tamara Rojo. The reason that sentence begins with “Next year” is that this coming December will still be devoted to over two weeks of performances of Helgi Tomasson’s choreography for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet score. In that context the new season will “officially” begin with the Opening Night Gala for the 91st season on January 24 of next year.

I suspect that I am not the only one wondering if and how the choreography of George Balanchine will fit into the repertoire that Rojo has planned. The answer is that Balanchine’s full-length ballet A Midsummer Night’s Dream will return. Those that attended opening night on March 6, 2020 will probably recall less about the performance and more about the leaflets handed out during intermission that marked the beginning of lockdown conditions in response to the threat of the COVID-19 virus. Midsummer will return next year with a run of performances between March 12 and March 23. The choreography will be situated in set designs by Christian LaCroix, which will be seen in the United States for the very first time.

Royal Ballet dancers Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin in the title roles of Frederick Ashton’s “Marguerite and Armand” ballet (photograph by Tristram Kenton, courtesy of the Royal Opera House)

The Balanchine program will be preceded by a program entitled British Icons, which will run from February 9 to February 15. Those “icons” are two of Balanchine’s contemporaries, working at the Royal Ballet: Chief Choreographer Frederick Ashton and Artistic Director Kenneth MacMillan. Many of Ashton’s works were created for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. The one that will be performed on this program will be “Marguerite and Armand,” based on the novel La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils, with influences by Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata. Ashton used Franz Liszt’s B minor piano sonata as the music for his choreography. The MacMillan selection will also involve a bold selection of the music, Gustav Mahler’s orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde. Drawing upon that title, MacMillan named his ballet “Song of the Earth.” Because Mahler’s thematic material drew upon Asian sources, MacMillan’s choreography was inspired by two Japanese theater styles: Noh and Kabuki.

Between Balanchine and the British “icons,” Swan Lake will be given a series of performances from February 23 to March 3, using the choreography created by Tomasson. Another “retrospective” selection will be a program of three of the ballets that were created for the next@90 festival that began the current SFB season. One of those will be Yuri Possokhov’s “Violin Concerto,” which amounted to his rethinking of the choreography that Balanchine had created for Igor Stravinsky’s violin concerto. The other two works will be Nicolas Blanc’s “Gateway to the Sun” and Danielle Row’s “MADCAP.”

More forward-looking will be the opening program of the season, which will run from January 26 to February 1. This will be a world premiere performance of a commissioned work that will bring choreographer Aszure Barton together with composer Floating Points (known to his friends as Sam Shepherd). This will be a full-evening ballet entitled Mere Mortals, and it will mark the first time that SFB has commissioned a female choreographer. The music will scored for orchestra and electronics, and the electronics will be performed by Floating Points in “real time.”

At “the other end” the season will conclude with a double bill of Latina choreographers. Arielle Smith has created her own approach to the “Carmen” narrative, and her choreography will be receiving its world premiere. She will work with a newly commissioned score composed by Arturo O’Farrill, which incorporates Cuban folk music. The other choreographer will be Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, whose “Broken Wings” will explore the life and work of Frida Kahlo. The composer for this ballet has not yet been named, but the original score will draw upon both mariachi sources and Mexican folk music.

The new season has its own home page, which includes hyperlinks for subscription renewals and new subscriptions. Currently, only renewals are being processed. New subscriptions will go on sale later this summer. Individual tickets will be available for purchase in the fall.

Thoughts About Hershy Kay and Igor Stravinsky

Back in the days when the New York City Ballet was “all about George Balanchine,” it was hard to avoid going to a program that did not show at least a few signs of Hershy Kay. Kay was primarily an orchestrator and an arranger, providing Balanchine with music from sources that departed from the usual ballet scores. One of the most popular of those Balanchine ballets was “Stars and Stripes,” which was structured as five “campaigns,” each of which was named after a composition by John Philip Sousa.

Those familiar with Sousa marches know that they all followed a very rigid structure. It did not take Balanchine long to realize that those structures were too confining. Kay had previously prepared a score for “Western Symphony,” which took familiar tunes from cowboy songs and provided Balanchine with episodes that would lend themselves to choreography. Where “Stars and Stripes” was concerned, Kay knew that Sousa composed more than marches. Indeed, the “El Capitan” march was based on themes that were taken from an operetta that Sousa had composed with the same title. As a result, Kay could provide a score for “Stars and Stripes” that went beyond expectations for Sousa but without compromising an overall sense of familiarity.

Nevertheless, when he had the task of arranging the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk for Ruthanna Boris’ ballet “Cakewalk,” there was an interesting blip in his efforts to throw new and original lights on Gottschalk’s piano music. One of the dance episodes in this ballet was called “Wallflower Waltz.” It did not take long for a listener familiar with ballet scores to recognize that this episode had less to do with Gottschalk and more to a composer who was not only alive but also working with Balanchine on a variety of projects. “Wallflower Waltz” comes across as an almost outrageous imitation of music that Stravinsky had composed for the ballet “Petrushka!” Was this an intentional prank on Kay’s part? Did Stravinsky ever attend a performance of “Cakewalk;” and, if so, did he recognize his own music lurking there?

I doubt that we shall ever have definitive answers to those questions; but it reminds us that “musical ideas” often slide from one composer to another, often without either of them realizing what had happened

A Weak Balanchine-Stravinsky Ballet

Since I find myself writing about ballet, this afternoon I decided to go back to seeking out videos on the Internet to spend some more time examining the partnership of choreographer George Balanchine with composer Igor Stravinsky. I must confess that my personal favorite from this repertoire is the “Rubies” movement from Balanchine’s Jewels trilogy. This was one of my first serious encounters with the Balanchine repertoire when I saw it performed in Saratoga in the summer of 1967. What struck me most about “Rubies” was its unabashedly raucous sense of humor and the unbridled joie de vivre that Patricia McBride and Edward Villella brought to their leading roles.

Many years later I would have an equally deep response to Balanchine’s setting of Stravinsky’s “Duo Concertante.” Balanchine created this dance for the 1972 Stravinsky Festival, but I did not become aware of it until I saw it on television. The ballet was created for Kay Mazzo and Peter Martins, and they appeared on a film by Hugo Niebeling, jointly produced by Unitel and the ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, second German television) public television channel. This was probably my first encounter with a Balanchine ballet that did not try to hide intense passion.

That same Festival included another setting of Stravinsky’s music that paired Mazzo and Martins; and, in the Dance in America video on YouTube, they are joined by a second couple of Karin von Aroldingen and Bart Cook (who had replaced Jean Pierre Bonnefoux, who had just left New York City Ballet). The title of this ballet was “Stravinsky Violin Concerto,” named after the music Balanchine had selected for his choreography. Sadly, this ballet did not register with the impact of either “Rubies” or “Duo Concertante,” having neither the wit of the former nor the intense passion of the latter.

Curiously, Stravinsky did not like violins very much. Nevertheless, there is much to engage the attentive listener in both “Duo Concertante” and the violin concerto. Perhaps, for reasons we may never know, Balanchine was never engaged with the concerto as he was with the duo. Mind you, there is no shortage of jaw-dropping elegant “mechanics” in the interplay among both the soloists and the moderately-sized “chorus.” However, on that YouTube recording it seems as if everyone is going about business-as-usual without allowing any expressiveness to bubble up to the surface.

Given how many choreographic settings of Stravinsky’s music were packed into that 1972 Festival, one could easily speculate that, at some point, Balanchine began to run out of steam in summoning up imaginative choreography; perhaps “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” was his way to telling the Festival audience, “Enough is enough!”

SFB Opening: Balanchine Saves the Day

Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Ballet (SFB) launched its 2022 season, which will celebrate the 37th and final season of Helgi Tomasson as Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer. Tomasson’s trajectory began with a scholarship at the School of American Ballet in New York when he was seventeen years old. He then advanced into the Joffrey Ballet, followed by the Harkness Ballet, and finally the New York City Ballet (NYCB), where he danced for fifteen years. His tenure in San Francisco began in 1985 after he left NYCB.

The high point of last night’s program reflected back on his experiences at NYCB and its repertoire of choreography by George Balanchine. The final selection was Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” a choreographic interpretation of a symphony that launched the career of Georges Bizet when he was at that same age of seventeen. Appropriately enough, Balanchine created this work for the Paris Opera Ballet during his tenure as guest ballet master there in 1947. (Ironically, while Bizet composed the music in 1855, the score was only discovered in 1933; and Balanchine first learned about it through Igor Stravinsky.)

The first appearance of an ensemble of men in the final movement of “Symphony in C” (photograph by Erik Tomasson, courtesy of SFB)

The choreography is the perfect example of how Balanchine would allow himself to be guided by the music. Indeed, back in my student days, when I could not get enough of either the music or the choreography, I used to claim that I could watch a silent film of the ballet and hear every note that Bizet had written in my head! Last night all those fatuous memories flooded back into consciousness. I recalled how each of the first three movements had its own ensemble of dancers and how all three of them gradually filled the stage for what may well be the grandest of grand finales.

This grand finale of Balanchine was complemented by one of Tomasson’s own efforts at choreography guided by the music. “Trio” is a setting of another four-movement composition, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s D minor Opus 70 string sextet (pairs of violins, violas, and cellos), given the title “Souvenir de Florence.” Those who know their Balanchine history know that his first creation in the United States was a setting of Tchaikovsky’s Opus 48 in C major for string ensemble, the ballet being given the simple title “Serenade.”

One can easily speculate that the spirit behind “Trio” amounted to a reflection on “Serenade.” Indeed, it is easy to assume that the spirit was made flesh in Tomasson’s setting of the second (Adagio cantabile e con moto) movement. Nevertheless, as one considers more intently the syntax, phrasing, and rhetoric of “Trio,” it becomes quickly apparent that the capacity for expressiveness is a pale shadow when compared with “Serenade.” Mind you, there is a certain lumbering quality that emerges when the music is performed by a full string ensemble; but it would have been impractical to expect a string sextet to carry the weight from the Opera House orchestra pit. To be fair, the dancing did its best to breathe life into the choreography; but earnest interpretation can only go so far when there is to little to interpret.

Nevertheless, there was a coherence to “Trio” that was seriously lacking in Cathy Morrison’s latest venture into narrative. “Mrs. Robinson” is based on one of the most successful films of the Sixties, The Graduate. It amounted to a bedroom farce that reflected the tempers of the times. The narrative was based on a novel of the same name by Charles Webb, but the deadpan comedy reflected the talents of screenwriter Buck Henry and director Mike Nichols.

In the film Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) has just graduated from college and has no idea what to do with his life. Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) is a sex-starved victim of suburban angst, who finds diversion in seducing Braddock. In the course of encountering the Robinson household, Braddock falls for Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter. This variation on a “triangle plot” is relatively slim; but the script has no end of comic turns, most of which unfold in passing by bit players.

Apparently, Marston wanted to reinterpret the narrative from Mrs. Robinson’s point of view. Considering that the point of view of both the novel and the film was that of an omniscient observer, Marston’s ambition was bold. Sadly, it was not particularly successful. There are seven soloist roles in her choreography, and it takes a while for mind to adjust to which dancer is executing which role. Furthermore, the scenario begins with our first view Braddock (presumably after his graduation ceremony); so any sense of point of view is never established particularly clearly. The result was a rather tedious slog that would leave anyone familiar with the source (film or novel) disappointed by the lack of wit and anyone else just plain mystified.

George Balanchine According to John Clifford

John Clifford on the cover of his book about George Balanchine (from the book’s Amazon.com Web page)

For several years I have taken a rather detached approach to the “holiday spirit;” and, as a result, I was more than a little surprised last month to find myself presented with the gift of a copy of John Clifford’s recent memoir, Balanchine’s Apprentice: From Hollywood to New York and Back. The choreography of George Balanchine played a major role in my personal development in observing performance and accounting for my observations through writing. My very first gig as a critic involved writing about ballet and modern dance at a time when my primary effort involved writing my doctoral dissertation. Indeed, it was through my work for Boston After Dark that I cultivated the ability to sit down and convert my thoughts into text with minimal agonizing over establishing my thoughts and then finding the right words for them. With that background, writing a thesis was a piece of cake!

Around fifteen years ago, I realized that, following a “lifetime career” in information technology after I had achieved my doctoral degree, going back to that “gig as a critic” was just the right “fit” for a retirement activity. Initially I focused on concert performances, taking advantage of the fact that the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was located only a few blocks to the south of where I was living. However, since my wife and I were San Francisco Opera subscribers, it did not take long for opera to be added to my writing topics. On the other hand, I had distanced myself from the dance for some time. As a result, the first time I covered a ballet with “press credentials” took place on the evening of March 6, 2020, when San Francisco Ballet began its run of performances of George Balanchine’s choreographed interpretation of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Ironically, it was during the intermission for that performance that we all learned that, in order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus (coronavirus), Mayor London N. Breed had ordered that all public performances, events, and gatherings at the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center would be cancelled. The initial duration of cancellation was only about two weeks; but this turned out to be only the camel’s nose under the tent. As a result, a performance by The Living Earth Show on the evening of March 7 marked the last time I would be part of a “physical” audience for over a year’s time.

Those that have been following this site since lockdown conditions were imposed know that I became pretty industrious in turning to streaming as an alternative for concert experiences. As a result of this change in my work practices, I found myself watching more ballet and modern dance performances. That included checking out video streams provided by the New York City Ballet (NYCB). When I found myself disappointed by “contemporary” performances of the choreography, I turned to YouTube to watch films of Balanchine dances whose performances had been supervised by the choreographer himself. Most of the content that became subject matter for my writing involved black-and-white films that had been uploaded to YouTube by Clifford.

I knew who Clifford was from my own past NYCB experiences. However, I knew relatively little about his overall career. Indeed, I did not give his career much thought, since my primary focus was on his ingenuity in using YouTube to provide a valuable historical record of Balanchine’s achievements. In that context I did not waste any time in getting to know more about him by reading his memoir.

Balanchine’s Apprentice is an unabashedly personal account of what it was like to work with Balanchine, chronicles by Clifford from his first encounter with NYCB through the School of American Ballet (SAB) in 1966 until his departure in 1974, when he left to found the Los Angeles Ballet. Ironically, Clifford’s arrival in New York occurred around the same time that I had begun to start watching ballet, first with the Pennsylvania Ballet (now the Philadelphia Ballet), followed by the Boston Ballet and eventually with my first NYCB subscription. Thus, more often than not, reading Clifford’s account of performing Balanchine works almost always resonated with old memories of my encounters with those same creations.

To be fair, however, in writing about Balanchine’s creations, Clifford engages a generous amount of fanboy rhetoric. I cannot really criticize him on that score. As a performer, he is virtually obliged to put a positive spin on what he is doing. (Edwin Denby once wrote a hysterically funny essay about negative spin and how dancers from different countries express it in different ways.) From my vantage point, on the other hand, what matters most is the ability to deliver a description convincing enough that the reader can make up his/her own mind as to whether the attitude is positive or negative.

In that context I feel a need to note that my only real difference of opinion involves the ballet “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.” The title refers to the fact that the music is Arnold Schoenberg’s orchestral realization of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 25 (first) piano quartet in G minor. This music tends to make more demands than many listeners would prefer to confront. There is a wide diversity of rhetorical stances that Brahms takes over the course of his four movements, and Schoenberg’s version extends that diversity to an even wider scope. My guess is that Balanchine never really “got” any of that rhetoric, perhaps because he usually approached every ballet he made with a piano reduction (which he himself prepared) of the music he had selected. As a result, if you think of looking at the music through a hole in the wall, then Schoenberg makes the hole wider, while Balanchine makes it smaller!

To be fair, Brahms himself had little to do with dancing. That genre is probably best associated with his “Hungarian” dances, which make for some of the composer’s most good-natured music in both the orchestral and four-hand piano versions. On the other hand the Opus 39 collection of sixteen waltzes (in both two-hand and four-hand versions) can almost be taken as “belly laugh” music, given the number of rhythmic patterns that tend to obscure the underlying three-beats-to-a-measure. Opus 25, on the other hand, is permeated with clearly-defined rhythmic patterns; but none of those patterns lend themselves to choreography, whether they are played by a piano quartet or a full orchestra.

That said, Balanchine did create a ballet that served Brahms far better than “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.” This was the two-act ballet Liebeslieder Walzer. The source for this ballet was the Opus 52 and Opus 65 sets of waltzes scored for four hands on one keyboard and soprano, contralto, tenor, and baritone vocal soloists. This is one of the ballets that was captured on film in Germany in 1973.

Clifford writes about the entire film-making experience; and it was clear that he felt it did not do justice to Balanchine. Nevertheless, he uploaded the Liebeslieder Waltzer film to his YouTube channel. While I appreciate Clifford’s disappointment with the film-making technique, I would still argue that the film makes the case that Balanchine was much more sensitive to how Brahms approached the waltz genre in his Opus 52 and Opus 65 collections than he was to the rhetorical foundations of the Opus 25 piano quartet.

Fortunately, Brahms is my only source of quibbling with Clifford’s book. Some may argue that Clifford did not write enough about his time in Los Angeles after he left NYCB. However, the title makes it clear that this book is more about Balanchine than about Clifford. Writing about the difficulties of forming and managing his own company in Los Angeles could easily have led to a barrage of complaints and injustices, which would have distracted the reader from the rich study of Balanchine’s work and personality that one encounters in the chapters situated in New York.

Brahms, Waltzes, and Balanchine

As promised yesterday, I used this morning to view the YouTube video of George Balanchine’s two-act ballet Liebeslieder Walzer (love-song waltzes). The video itself was created from a 1973 German film; and, like many other video accounts of Balanchine’s choreography, it was uploaded to YouTube by John Clifford. Clifford included the following cautionary sentence on the Web page:

Some in the very beginning is missing and a few brief moments are off the music.

Sadly, the quality of the video itself leaves much to be desired. Watching it will require more than a little patience, but one can still learn much about the choreography that was created.

Balanchine’s title was drawn directly from the music he selected. Unless I am mistaken, this was his first effort in working with the music of Johannes Brahms. The title of the ballet was taken from two collections of waltzes that Brahms’ scored for piano four hands and four vocalists, soprano, contralto, tenor, and baritone. The title of Opus 52 was Liebeslieder Waltzes, and it was followed by the Opus 65 Neue Liebeslieder (new love songs). As I observed yesterday, all the musicians shared the stage with four couples of dancers. In the film that Clifford uploaded, those couples were Violette Verdy and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, Karin von Aroldingen (who now holds the rights to this ballet) and Peter Martins, Kay Mazzo and Conrad Ludlow, and Patricia McBride and Frank Ohman. The pianists were Dianne Chilgren and Gordon Boelzner, and the vocalists were unidentified.

Yesterday’s article cited Brahms’ (probably humorous) regret at not having composed the “Blue Danube” waltz. The fact is that Brahms had a great interest in waltzes, and Opus 52 was preceded by an earlier four-hand piano collection, the Opus 39 set of sixteen waltzes. In this set one encounters some highly imaginative rhythms that seem to be poking fun at the traditional three-beats-to-the-measure pattern. Furthermore, the last of the waltzes takes an ambiguous approach to not only the rhythm but also the thematic material.

In both Opus 52 and Opus 65 Brahms continues to take occasional jabs at tradition with his not-really-a-waltz architectures. Balanchine seems to have been keenly aware of what Brahms was doing in these compositions. While the choreography serves up a fair share of familiar “waltz idioms,” Balanchine, too, finds ways to depart from those idioms. As a result, neither the music nor the choreography ever leaves the listener/viewer discontented with a “one damned thing after another” performance.

At this point I should make a confession, which is that I have never followed a text sheet for these songs, either at a recital or while listening to a recording. It goes without saying that, when I saw this ballet at the New York State Theater, the texts were not included in the program book. After all, we were supposed to be looking at the stage! The technology for projected titles had not yet found its way into performance venues; but I suspect that even they would distract from the rich diversity one encounters in both Brahms’ music and Balanchine’s choreography.

The fact is that the music easily comes across as a highly imaginative pair of studies in miniaturist rhetoric. Balanchine seems to have clearly understood that structural foundation. While there were several episodes in the ballet in which a “theme” would progress across a few successive waltzes, more often than not, the choreography would confine itself to a single waltz. The result was a bit like the impact of a haiku that captures an isolated moment; and, in the overall flow of the choreography, such a moment might escape the inattentive viewer.

The entire ballet is about 45 minutes in duration. Unless I am mistaken, when I saw it at the New York State Theater there was an intermission between Opus 52 and Opus 65. That would have been a wise programming decision. Even the most attentive listener/viewer needs a break around the half-way mark! Taken as a whole, the ballet ventures into content that Balanchine rarely (if ever) explored in any of his other creations. By all rights it deserves a better video document than the flawed German account, which currently seems to be the only option.

Brahms and the Ballet

At the beginning of this month, much to my surprise, I received, as a gift, a copy of John Clifford's memoir Balanchine's Apprentice: From Hollywood to New York and Back. As I write this, I am about halfway through the book; and I am already accumulating notes to prepare for writing about it in its entirety. However, I wanted to reflect on my one experience thus far in which my opinion contrasted sharply with Clifford's.

This concerns the ballet that George Balanchine created entitled "Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet." While Clifford bubbles with enthusiasm over specific dancers, particularly those in the original cast, that performed this ballet, on the one occasion when I saw this ballet performed in the New York State Theater, there was little about the choreography or its execution that left much of an impression. Furthermore, last year when I was depending on streaming to write about performances, I happened to encounter two different programs, in June and October, respectively, that presented excerpts; and both of those video streams left me as cold as I had recalled my first encounter to be.

What strikes me the most is a sense that Brahms' music was not particularly suitable for dancing. Indeed, Brahms seemed aware of this shortcoming. There is an anecdote that, on one particular social occasion, a woman offered Brahms her fan and asked him to autograph it. Instead, he jotted down the opening measures of the "Blue Danube" waltz, underneath which, he wrote, "Not, alas, by Johannes Brahms!"

In all fairness, there is not much by way of dance rhetoric in Brahms' Opus 25 piano quartet in G minor; and Schoenberg's orchestration did little to enhance that rhetoric. (Only the fourth movements has the potential to lend itself to dance.) On the other hand, Balanchine had previously created choreography for both of the Brahms Liebeslieder Walzer collections. Indeed, New York City Ballet had been performing that choreography for many years before Jerome Robbins' "Dances at a Gathering" made it fashionable to dance with a piano on stage. (Those that know Brahms' music can guess that, for Balanchine's ballet, there were two pianists on the stage sharing a single keyboard and performing with four vocal soloists.)

Fortunately, I just found the YouTube Web page for Balanchine's more successful encounter with Brahms; and, given how quiet things are for the rest of the year, I should have no trouble watching this film and documenting my impressions.

SFB Launches 2021 Digital Season

Last night San Francisco Ballet (SFB) launched its 2021 Digital Season by revisiting the first and only offering of last year’s season at the War Memorial Opera House. During that past performance of George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the word went out from City Hall that all public performances, events, and gatherings at the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center were to be cancelled to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The initial cancellation was to last through March 20, 2020; but, as we all now know all too well, that cancellation is still in effect.

A few days after that announcement SFB was able to return to the Opera House with a film crew led by Frank Zamacona. A multi-camera capture of the entire ballet was created, and the Web page for viewing the results was launched last night. That Web page will remain active through February 10.

What is probably most important is that the resulting video provides a viewing experience that goes beyond what anyone could have seen from any seat in the Opera House. Regular readers should, by now, be familiar with Zamacona’s name through the videos he created for the San Francisco Opera, many of which have been made available for viewing through the Opera is ON service. He clearly understands how to determine the right vantage point for every instance of the drama unfolding on the stage; and, when the curtain is down, he is just as skilled in tracking the instrumental performance in the orchestra pit. For Midsummer that included several opportunities to appreciate Martin West’s skills in managing the breadth of instrumental resources required to perform the music by Felix Mendelssohn.

Most of the video, however, involved accounting for the highly imaginative choreography for an extended corps de ballet along with a rich cast of characters exploring the interplay between the natural and supernatural worlds. That narrative was further enhanced by the “hyper-reality” of Martin Pakledinaz’ scenic designs, enlarging the flora of the forest to remind the viewer of how small the fairies are. As I observed last year, Balanchine developed his own plot line, rather than following William Shakespeare’s lead. This was more than a matter of allowing for all that splendid corps de ballet work. It also entailed a rich diversity of techniques through which character traits could be established without the characters ever speaking.

Titania (Sasha De Sola) and her attendants (photograph by Erik Tomasson, courtesy of San Francisco Ballet)

For the most part his techniques were impressively convincing. The relationship between Oberon (Esteban Hernandez) and Titania (Sasha De Sola) emerges as richer than the squabbling one encounters in Shakespeare’s text, while Puck (Cavan Conley) establishes himself as the “prime mover” of the entire narrative. (Was he serving as alter ego of Balanchine himself?)

Then, of course, there is the abundant abstract choreography in the second act, which I had previously described as moving Shakespeare into “Aurora’s Wedding” territory. In this case there are three couples getting married: Theseus-Hippolyta, Lysander-Hermia, Demetrius-Helena. [updated 1/24, 7 a.m. for a more accurate account of how Theseus and Hippolyta figure in the choreography: Theseus and Hippolyta are finally given distinctive “voices,” albeit through some lusciously elegant non-narrative choreography.] Mostly, however, the act consists of Balanchine abstractions at their finest, returning to narrative only to wrap up the entire ballet with Puck’s monologue.

Clearly, no spirits were offended in the making of this video account of one of Balanchine’s more extended creations.

Episodes from Balanchine’s “Episodes”

This past Sunday, when I decided to write about George Balanchine’s ballet “Ivesiana,” I realized that I ran the risk of painting myself into a corner. I suggested that, in deciding to work with the music of Charles Ives, Balanchine took the first of three steps that involved departing from the conventions of tonal music, conventions that were still honored by many twentieth-century composers. Indeed, the second of those steps, “Agon,” marked Igor Stravinsky’s first venture into working with atonality. In that context the third of the steps was the most adventurous, since it involved all of the orchestral compositions by Anton Webern, music that probably perplexes many listeners today as much as it did during Webern’s lifetime in the first half of the twentieth century.

To “review” the bidding, Balanchine and Martha Graham divided their repertoire into two approximately equal portions for a two-part full-evening composition entitled Episodes. Graham selected the earliest compositions, which were also the longest, the Opus 1 passacaglia and the six pieces for full orchestra collected in Opus 6. She also presented the first of the two parts, a narrative based on the tense relationship between Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, the Queen of England, counting on Webern’s “tense” sonorities to account for that relationship and its fatal conclusion.

Of the compositions that remained for the second part of the program, Balanchine set aside the Opus 30 “Variations” to choreograph as a solo for Paul Taylor, then a featured dancer in Martha Graham’s company. That left four Webern compositions for the New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancers, the Opus 21 “Symphony,” the Opus 10 collection of five pieces, the Opus 24 “Concerto,” and Webern’s imaginative instrumentation of the six-voice fugue that was included in Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1079 collection entitled The Musical Offering. After Episodes was performed in its entirety, Graham’s portion was dropped from both her own repertoire and that of NYCB; and “Episodes” remained in repertoire as the four pieces that Balanchine had created for his own dancers.

I saw this version exactly once as part of the only NYCB subscription I ever purchased. I was majoring in mathematics at the time and was one of many of my ilk that was fascinated by the different approaches to permutation found in serial composition. Nevertheless, I suspect that, like everyone else (I do not think I need to quality “everyone” with “just about”), I came away most satisfied with the orchestrated Bach fugue. For that matter, my guess is that Balanchine was in the same boat with the rest of us. He understood Bach fugues well enough to set them to choreography, regardless of what instruments were playing the notes.

I had hoped that I would be able to take a deeper dive into Balanchine’s choreography for the other three movements, but this turned out to be more problematic than I anticipated. The best I was able to manage was to find three separate “Episodes” videos of the first (Opus 21), third (Opus 24), and fourth (Bach) movements. These were in color with black-and-white opening titles identifying the music and the NYCB soloists for each of the movements. The overall video quality was, at best, middling and practically intolerable for the Bach. (It would not surprise me if the Opus 10 movement was absent because it was even worse than the Bach movement.) No indication was given of where, when, or by whom these videos were made.

Of these three videos, Opus 21 probably provides the best evidence of how Balanchine approached analyzing the music before creating choreography for it. I would assume that his attempts to learn about Webern’s techniques included an awareness of the two primary ways in which a sequence of pitches could be permuted. One of them is the retrograde transform, which simply reorders the notes in reverse. The other is inversion, in which all note-to-note intervals are the same but rising and falling directions are reversed.

At this point I need to digress a bit on the issue of how transformations of marks on paper register with the ear. Inversion tends to be easy to recognize, particularly if the rhythm stays the same. (Think of how often Bach uses this device in his fugues.) Retrogression is far more difficult for mind to process. Indeed, it cannot be processed by a basic “finite-state machine” (the mathematical construct that serves as the foundation of any computer). It requires a more powerful abstract construct; and, without risking losing readers by going into too much detail, I shall say simply that the construct is called a “push-down automaton” (named after the ways plates are stacked in a cafeteria).

What all this means is that, because inversion registers with the ear far more readily than retrogression, I suspect that Balanchine was more aware of it in examining the scores of the music he was setting. Thus, towards the end of Opus 21, when he encountered an inversion he had his male soloist (Anthony Blum on this video) take his partner (Sarah Leland) firmly and flip her upside down:

from the YouTube video of the first movement of Balanchine’s “Episodes”

She then did a series of ronds de jambes in that position before getting flipped back upright and set down on the floor. This is but one instance of how Balanchine seems to have decided that any connection between Opus 21 and what anyone thinks a symphony is would be purely coincidental!

Opus 24 goes to an even further extreme. This is a “concerto” for nine solo instruments. The choreography involves only six dancers, a “leading couple” (Allegra Kent and Bart Cook on the video) and a “chorus” of four women. In this case what is most interesting is how these six dancers are deployed in a series of interconnecting configurations, which may or may not parallel the interconnections of the solo instruments. In order to capture some of the visual coherence of Balanchine’s designs, a few of the camera shots are taken above the dancers, rather than from the audience point of view. It would not surprise me to learn that Balanchine himself requested that those shots be incorporated in this video account of the geometric aspects of his choreography.

It would not surprise me to learn that, after having agreed to be part of this “Webern project,” Balanchine found himself in “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” (as Winston Churchill put it when he was trying to describe Russia under the rule of Joseph Stalin). Balanchine’s “Episodes” is likely to appeal to puzzle-solvers. It is definitely not a “sit back and watch” ballet. However, just as there are dances created by Merce Cunningham that appeal to an appreciation of abstract art, Balanchine seemed willing to work with the abstractions that figured in Webern’s music (including his Bach orchestration). The viewer willing to let those abstractions be abstract, so to speak, should have no trouble getting drawn into Balanchine’s choreography; and I suspect that such attraction would be even more powerful if there were a better video account of that choreography.

Balanchine’s Choreography of Ives

The Fifties was the decade during which admirers of choreographer George Balanchine had a chance to see just how “far out” he was willing to go … whether they wanted to go with him or not! Balanchine’s education had included intense studies of music theory and the structural analysis of scores. However, the twentieth century was when the foundations of those studies were challenged by new approaches to composition that, for example, no longer saw the need for a tonal center or a perfect cadence to define that center. As a result, in the decade following the end of World War II and the emergence of a new and adventurous crop of composers, everything was “up for grabs.”

Over the course of the Fifties, Balanchine committed himself to choreographing music by twentieth-century composers at their most adventurous. Three ballets from his repertoire stand out for the ways in which they confronted those adventures. Ironically, the very first of these acknowledges music that had preceded not only World War II but also World War I. The composer of that music was Charles Ives; and the music for the four movements of the “Ivesiana” ballet was composed between 1904 and 1908.

Each of the movements bore the name of the composition being set: “Central Park in the Dark,” “The Unanswered Question,” “In the Inn,” and “In the Night.” (Originally, the ballet had six movements; but the choreography for “Halloween” and “Over the Pavements” was subsequently dropped.) “Ivesiana” was premiered on September 14, 1954. (By way of context, Ives’ second symphony, completed in 1902, was not given its first performance until February 22, 1951, when it was played by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein; so it is not out of the question that Bernstein tweaked Balanchine’s interest in Ives.)

The second ballet involved one of Balanchine’s favorite composers, Igor Stravinsky. “Agon,” which was discussed on this site this past June, was first performed on November 27, 1957. As was observed at that time, Stravinsky’s score included his first efforts to work with a twelve-tone row, thus crossing the metaphorical bridge that had separated him from Arnold Schoenberg. Balanchine had taken on Schoenberg’s music for his “Opus 34” ballet, first performed on January 19, 1954; but that work seems to be all but entirely forgotten. He was clearly much more in his element when working with Stravinsky, even if the atonal portions of the music bordered on the simplistic spelling-out of tone rows.

The last of the three ballets was actually a joint project. The complete orchestral works of Anton Webern were divided between Balanchine and Martha Graham. Each provided half of a two-part ballet entitled Episodes. As might be expected, Graham’s portion was based on a narrative, the subject being the relationship between Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, the Queen of England. Balanchine’s choreography, on the other hand, was abstract and suggested that he was well aware of many of the theoretical underpinnings of Webern’s scores.

Today I discovered that John Clifford had uploaded a 1964 Canadian video of “Ivesiana” to YouTube. Given the pioneering role that this ballet plays in the Balanchine canon, I could not resist the opportunity to view it and discuss the experience. By way of disclaimer, I should note that I have not the foggiest idea of how much Balanchine knew about Ives. However, if he followed his usual approach to preparing a new ballet, writing out his own piano reduction of the orchestral score, then I have to wonder how he felt that strategy turned out for him. (By way of context, I would guess that there are still quite a few conductors that have difficulties in parsing many, if not most, of Ives’ scores.)

Arthur Mitchell and Patricia Neary dancing “In the Inn” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Of the four pieces that Balanchine set, “In the Inn” was probably the closest to his comfort zone. The music sounds enough like a pastiche of popular tunes that Balanchine could resort to many of his steps based on “hoofing.” Indeed, Patricia Neary and Arthur Mitchell looked as if they had been chosen to serve up something entertaining for the televised version of The Ed Sullivan Show.

This is not, in any way, intended as a dismissive brush-off. Balanchine knew a thing or two about hoofing; and it is clear from his choreography for the musical On Your Toes that he knew about the “cultural clash” between hoofers and ballet dancers. He would subsequently return to that clash in the “Rubies” movement of his Jewels ballet; and, in many respects, “In the Inn” provides “warm-up” material that subsequently served the creation of “Rubies.”

More challenging was the task of setting the first two movements. Both of the Ives compositions were originally given very lengthy titles: “A Contemplation of Nothing Serious or Central Park in the Dark in ‘The Good Old Summer Time’” and “A Contemplation of a Serious Matter or The Unanswered Perennial Question.” It goes without saying that contemplation is not the sort of activity that lends itself to choreography; and there is more than a suggestion that, in both of these movements, Balanchine was basically experimenting with patterns that would be suitable in getting him from beginning to end. As a result, the emergence of a popular tune evoking that “Good Old Summer Time” passes by almost unnoticed. “In the Night” is similarly ambiguous; but, because this is the final movement of the ballet, Balanchine was able to set it with a relatively pleasing approach to apotheosis.

As a result, I would speculate that Balanchine was probably as flummoxed by Ives’ composition techniques as was just about anyone approaching his music during the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, I have to applaud Balanchine for being able to get his passionate audience to sit still and listen to Ives’ music. (Sadly, Ives died four months before the first performance of “Ivesiana.”) Furthermore, the fact that he could get that lightning to strike again for Webern is just as impressive. The bottom line is that I would leap at any opportunity to see performances of either (or both) “Ivesiana” and Balanchine’s portion of “Episodes;” and, if Balanchine was not quite there yet when that Canadian video was made in 1954, having a video record should benefit us all in following his path. 

“Classic” NYCB Program Bats .500

Yesterday evening I viewed the Classic NYCB YouTube video created as part of the Digital Fall Season of the New York City Ballet (NYCB). The program consisted of four selections, three choreographed by George Balanchine and one by Jerome Robbins. Only one of the selections, Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant,” was performed in its entirety. The remaining three offerings were excerpts, at least one of which was poorly served for being ripped out of context. Each selection had been recorded at a different performance at the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center.

The most satisfying offering was “Duo Concertant.” Readers may recall that I wrote at some length about this ballet this past April as a follow-up to a review I had written about a recent CD recording of the music by Igor Stravinsky that Balanchine had selected (with the same title as the ballet). The performance of the ballet that I discussed was a film that had been made for German public television with NYCB dancers Kay Mazzo and Peter Martins.

The film was a very intimate affair. With its “backstage” setting, it suggested that Mazzo and Martins were working with violinist Cees Van Schaik and pianist Gordon Boelzner to prepare for a performance. The Classic NYCB video was truer to Balanchine’s original conception, which involved only these four performers on the vast stage of the New York State Theater. The result is a very limited deployment of the overall space but with an intensely profound impact.

In the first place the two dancers, Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley, spend much of their time as “audience” for the musicians, Arturo Delmoni, Concertmaster of the NYCB Orchestra, and pianist Elaine Chelton. Departing from the side of the piano to dance almost seems like an afterthought. However, Balanchine’s choreography is anything but, embracing an extensive repertoire of both solo and duo passages, several of which clearly reflect the polyphony in Stravinsky’s score.

The first “meeting of hands” in “Duo Concertant” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

If much of what unfolds feels like Balanchine-business-as-usual (albeit satisfyingly so), Stravinsky’s final movement (“Dithryambe”) comes as a shock. All the lights go out (requiring the musicians to play from memory). A lone spotlight captures Fairchild’s head and shoulders. Her hand reaches into a void and withdraws, after which Huxley’s hand appears, almost as if seeking Fairchild’s. When the hands confront each other, the spotlight deprives us from seeing any more of either of the dancers. Gradually, the scope of visibility expands; and we are back in the “normal” world of engagement between a pair of dancers. Ultimately, however, total darkness overcomes the stage, leaving both dancers and observers in an uncertain void.

If “Duo Concertante” concludes with such spare minimality, the final selection of the program, the fourth movement from “Symphony in C” (setting the only symphony composed by Georges Bizet) was the polar opposite. Sadly, the distance of those poles can only be really appreciated by those familiar with the entire ballet. Each of the first three movements of this ballet has its own corps de ballet, each reflecting the characteristic rhetoric of those movements. The final movement then serves as an energetic finale in which all three of those corps gradually go about filling the stage with eye-popping results. Sadly, the choreographic technique through which those separate corps come together to join forces can only really be appreciated after each of the individual corps has established its own character through Bizet’s corresponding symphony movement. In spite of that shortcoming, there is still so much to see in so many dancers occupying the stage at the same time, the polar opposite of the vast empty spaces of “Duo Concertante.”

The remainder of the program was much more disappointing. The program began with the first movement of “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet,” Balanchine’s choreographic interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg’s orchestral realization of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 25 (first) piano quartet in G minor. Balanchine was fascinated with Schoenberg throughout his career, but it is unclear that he could ever get his head into Schoenberg’s game (although he certainly made some well-intentioned attempts). In the Balanchine canon, Brahms is best known for providing the music for “Liebeslieder Walzer,” which choreographed the two collections of songs that Brahms composed under that title, Opus 52 and Opus 65.

Schoenberg’s project was slightly ironic. Brahms did not complete his first symphony (Opus 68 in C minor) until 1876, while Opus 25 was completed in 1861. However, Schoenberg was not interested in turning Opus 25 into Brahms’ “zeroth” symphony. Rather, he had his own ideas about instrumentation that ventured far beyond Brahms’ repertoire or instrumental sonorities. However, Schoenberg’s treatment is too elaborate with too many subtle twists to survive in the confines of an orchestra pit, meaning that one cannot really appreciate the imaginative qualities of his work in a ballet setting. Furthermore, it almost seems as if Balanchine, who could read orchestral scores as well as any of his conductors could, ever really grasped what Schoenberg had done (or, for that matter, what Brahms had done to inspire Schoenberg’s project).

What emerged gave the impression of Balanchine caught in a collision between theory and practice. As a result there was a disconcerting sense of the routine in his choreography of the first movement. Indeed, it is unclear that Balanchine “got his head in the game” before the wild gypsy rhetoric of the final movement. The good news is that the gypsy spirit was so compelling that one could walk away from “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet” with a lilt in one’s gait. Sadly, that spirit never managed to take root during the first movement of this ballet, which does almost no justice to the many skills Balanchine could muster.

The remaining work of the program consisted of the final two movements from Jerome Robbins’ mammoth Chopin anthology, “Dances at a Gathering.” The selections by Frédéric Chopin for these last two movements were the Opus 20 (first) scherzo in B minor and the first of the Opus 15 nocturnes in F major. The entire ballet consists of eighteen movements. As one watches Opus 20, it is difficult to avoid speculating that Robbins was running out of steam, saving what inventiveness he had left for the apotheosis of the concluding nocturne. Sadly, the video document offered little beyond a sense of going through the motions; and, for all of this ballet’s popularity, my own feeling is that it should be allowed to lapse from memory.

On Preferring the Dance to the Dancer

This afternoon I took advantage of my Netflix connection to watch the documentary Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan. The film chronicled Whelan’s life during what turned out to be her final year with the New York City Ballet (NYCB). Whelan was one of those dancers that “rose through the ranks,” beginning as an apprentice in 1984 and subsequently going through a series of promotions up to the level of principal dancer in 1991. However, she had her first serious encounter with physical pain in 2012 after an accident and required surgical reconstruction on her hip in 2013.

The film begins as she is preparing for that surgery. It then follows her through physical therapy to her return to NYCB and her departure from the company in 2014. Ironically, the first time I saw her dance, I knew nothing about her biographical context. That occasion took place late in November of 2017, when she gave a duo performance with choreographer Brian Brooks of his one-hour composition Some of a Thousand Words. The music was performed by the members of the Brooklyn Rider string quartet, violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Michael Nicolas, situated at the very real of the stage. For the most part none of that choreography triggered any memories of NYCB, the one possible exception being a reference to the two rehearsing dancers in Jerome Robbins’ “Afternoon of a Faun.”

Ironically, none of what has been reported in those two preceding paragraphs has anything to do with the title of the documentary. Restless Creature was the title of a collaborative project that Whelan had initiated in 2012 entirely independent of her NYCB activities. Indeed, any reference to this project is made only in casual passing over the course of the 94-minute film. As a result, watching this documentary reminded me that, as a rule, my focus tends to be on the choreography. The extent to which I pay attention to the dancers simply has to do with whether or not that choreography has been given a faithful account.

I realize that mine is a “minority opinion.” At the same time, however, it may explain why the ballet videos I discussed three or more months ago tended to elicit reactions of disappointment. That explanation can, in turn, be traced back to an attitude towards ballet cultivated by George Balanchine himself. This is particularly true of his abstract ballets, in which, for all intents and purposes, the dancers are practically interchangeable parts. Ultimately, all that really matters involves the relationships between the movements one sees and the music one hears. If personality is an issue at all, it lies in any narrative behind the choreography; and Balanchine himself was never that enthusiastic about narrative.

Mind you, whether Balanchine liked it or not, there were times when personality would impact the execution of even the most abstract of his choreography. My favorite example is probably “Donizetti Variations,” which I did not see until around 1970, some ten years after Balanchine had created it. This is a ballet that I discussed briefly on this site near the end of this past May. As the title suggests, was a ballet in which most of the movements involved elaborately elegant solo work, each variation serving as a platform for a different dancer. The variations passed dutifully in sequence, each given its own skilled account. The final variation, however, was allotted to Melissa Hayden. By that time in her life, she had what might be called “veteran” status; but, as she glided her way through her variation, she showed all the other “young pups” what it really meant to dance Balanchine’s choreography!

Obviously, no such “flash of enlightenment” takes place during Restless Creature. The documentary is about the woman immersed in the practice of dance, rather than about the practice itself. However, with my own past experience of Some of a Thousand Words, I realized that I was more interested in what this particular dancer was doing in the wake of deciding to put some 30-odd years of experience with NYCB behind her.

Furthermore, many readers may recall that I dealt with my disappointment of the NYCB broadcasts of this past spring by seeking out archival films and videos that left me less disappointed. Even earlier, I was lucky enough to enjoy the only performance by the San Francisco Ballet of Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream before the War Memorial went into lockdown. There was more than enough to enjoy in this “transplanting” of Balanchine’s choreography from New York to San Francisco, which turned out to be far more satisfying than the video content subsequently presented by NYCB. Perhaps New York is no longer the focal point of Balanchine’s work, and we should pay more attention to how tradition migrates not only across performers but also across geography.