Yesterday evening New York City Ballet (NYCB) moved on to the fourth program in its “Digital Spring Season.” After my annoyance with the commercial intrusions upon the “replay” version of last Tuesday’s program (which I did not get around to watching until Thursday), I made it a point to experience the “live broadcast,” which began here at 5 p.m. The new program turned out to be a double bill, coupling George Balanchine’s “Ballo della Regina” with the pas de deux (second) movement from Christopher Wheeldon’s “After the Rain.”
This was only my “second contact” with “Ballo della Regina,” the first have been on a PBS broadcast of Balanchine: Dance in America. The ballet left little impression on me the first time; and this encounter, some 40 years later, was no different. There is little that one can say about the ballet beyond it being technically demanding. In the overall canon it comes after the thoroughly ravishing “Vienna Waltzes” and before the intense narrative of “Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze,” both clearly etched in memory. What was the problem?
My conjecture goes back to Bernard Taper’s book about Balanchine, through which I first learned about the method behind the creation of his choreography. Balanchine would begin by selecting the music. Prior to the very first rehearsal, he would prepare his own piano reduction of the orchestral score. With that understanding of “what made the music tick,” he could then turn the workings of the score into the workings of the dance.
The music for “Ballo della Regina” came from ballet music in the original 1867 version of Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos. Nineteenth-century Italian opera did not figure very strongly in Balanchine’s musical preferences. (My only “fly on the wall” experience took place at the Stage Entrance of the New York State Theater, when I heard him grumbling about having to share the space with the New York City Opera.) Nevertheless, there was delightful diversity in his 1960 “Donizetti Variations,” which made for one of my most memorable Melissa Hayden experiences.
Perhaps the music of Gaetano Donizetti was more amenable to Balanchine’s methodology. Perhaps Balanchine applied his usual method to Verdi’s score and began to lose interest. Perhaps he never saw a full score of the 1867 version and could not apply his usual techniques. Whatever the explanation may be, there is a disheartening remoteness between dance and music that one does not expect from Balanchine. To make matters worse, the Digital Spring Season broadcast, taken from a performance on May 12, 2016, frequently foundered on clearly visible lapses in technical precision. The “Balanchine legacy” simply did not deserve the inclusion of this particular “data point.”
The Wheeldon offering was another matter. “After the Rain” is a two-movement choreography setting two compositions by Arvo Pärt. The pas de deux is set to “Spiegel im Spiegel” (mirror in the mirror), composed for piano and violin. The structure is minimal, grounded entirely in a single major triad. Like many Pärt compositions, this establishes a sense of stasis in which time almost seems to stand still.
In contrast Wheeldon created a pas de deux of intense and highly varied activity. There was no faulting the scope of his capacity for invention, leaving the impression that he was treating the music as a blank canvas on which anything could be painted. It seemed as if all that really mattered was the steady pulse provided by the music, providing a frame of reference that could not be sacrificed by having the dance performed in silence. Initially, I was put off by this. However, I have come to appreciate Wheeldon’s methodology, even if it does not really appeal to my personal tastes; and there is no questioning the rich diversity of imagination that one encounters in the choreography.
Given my activities earlier this week, I found it interesting that this pas de deux has “ancestry” in Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant.” Two dancers (Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall in this performance) are accompanied by two musicians (Arturo Delmoni, Concertmaster of the NYCB Orchestra, and pianist Nancy McDill). However, Wheeldon does not have the musicians share the stage with the dancers. Instead, they are in the orchestra pit with the musicians required for “Tabula Rasa,” the music for the first movement of “After the Rain.” It would be interesting for these two “double duos” to be performed back-to-back. One could appreciate that any similarities on the surface are contrasted by distinctive differences in the deeper structures.
No comments:
Post a Comment