The seventh program in the “Digital Spring Season” of the New York City Ballet (NYCB) served as a survey of five relatively short selections, most of them excerpts, three of choreography by George Balanchine. The other two featured the work of Jerome Robbins. All of the videos were captured during performances that took place between September of 2016 and May of 2019. All but one of them were works I had previously seen in performance (not necessarily by NYCB).
If part of the objective behind the “Digital Spring Season” was to sample the many different aspects of Balanchine’s choreography, then this program provided particularly essential viewing. One of the selections is even based on my favorite Balanchine anecdote, documented in Bernard Taper’s 1960 biography:
A friend who went backstage to congratulate Balanchine after the première, in 1952, of Caracole, a ballet to the music of Mozart’s Divertimento No. 15, remembers finding Balanchine off to one side, by himself, in a kind of rapture. “Oh, that Mozart—that music!” he kept saying, and paid no heed to his admirer’s compliments on the wonders of his choreography.
That setting of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 287 would be entirely overhauled and performed on May 31, 1956 under the new title “Divertimento No. 15.”
The statement of Mozart’s theme in Balanchine’s “Divertimento No. 15” (screen shot from the video being discussed)
Unless I am mistaken, Balanchine dropped the second Menuetto movement from Mozart’s six-movement score. However, the high point of both the music and the choreography was the second movement; and Andante theme with six variations, almost all set as solo dances. I am not sure there has ever been any other piece of choreography that captures the spirit behind Mozart’s approach to writing variations as this one does. This is all the more impressive given the brevity of the theme itself, reminding at least some of my generation of Buckminster Fuller’s injunction that we all need to find ways of making more and more with less and less.
That said, the only real shortcoming of this movement is that it has to contend with the behavior of rabid balletomanes. Both theme and variations are models of the impact of brevity, so this is both music and choreography in which every instant counts. Nevertheless, there will always be those that cannot resist the urge to applaud enthusiastically at every skillful solo turn. Unfortunately, the choreography flows along with the pace of Mozart’s music; and pausing after each variation not only would be tedious but also would upset the flow Balanchine had conceived. Thus, the viewer of last night’s video had to contend with audience applause drowning out the music at the beginning of each following variation, even when that opening gesture is the one that defines the spirit of the choreography for that variation! Both Balanchine and Mozart deserve more respect, but audiences will be audiences.
Such overt enthusiasm was better suited to the final work on last night’s program, the final movement of Balanchine’s “Western Symphony,” set to an arrangement of cowboy songs prepared by Hershy Kay. The choreography is unabashed entertainment from a time of pride in a richly extroverted American spirit. While there is no shortage of solo work, the highlight of the choreography resides in how the size of the corps de ballet keeps growing and growing. At its core this ballet may be little more than foot-stomping spectacle, but Balanchine knew how to make a silk purse out of that spectacle.
The remaining Balanchine selection was the “Phlegmatic” movement from “The Four Temperaments.” Balanchine commissioned Paul Hindemith to write the score for this ballet, and the composer replied with what amounted to a concerto for piano and string orchestra. The ballet was first performed on November 20, 1946.
It is a perfect example of how Balanchine’s approach to the abstract could reflect the subtleties of personality traits, very much following in the spirit of “Serenade.” Each of the four personality types depicted in the ballet has its own unique representation in both music and dance. However, in contrast to the variations in “Divertimento No. 15,” there are geometric motifs through which the individual temperaments are integrated into the seamless unity of human nature itself. Last night’s account of the geometry could not have been more satisfying. Sadly, however, while male soloist Ask la Cour had a solid command of Balanchine’s steps, he never really conveyed any sense of the phlegmatic as a personal disposition. Balanchine always knew that there was more to his choreography than the steps, but this particular reconstruction never seemed to have captured just what that “more” was.
Robbins was represented by two works from different times in his career. The program began with the “Spring” movement from “The Four Seasons,” another ballet based on the music from Giuseppe Verdi’s operas. The choreography is abstract, coming across almost as a playbook of modern ballet patterns. Nevertheless, Robbins seemed more attuned to the spirit behind Verdi’s music than Balanchine was when he created “Ballo della Regina.”
Far more memorable is Robbins’ “Afternoon of a Faun,” which was first performed by Tanaquil LeClerq and Francisco Moncion on May 14, 1953. Robbins’ interpretation has nothing to do with Vaslav Nijinsky’s portrayal of an erotic faun or any of the earlier programmatic connotations of Claude Debussy’s music. Rather, it presents two dancers in a studio exercising their technical skills in front of a mirror, which is the “wall” between the audience and the stage. Nevertheless, for all of that abstraction, there are definitely erotic undertones in Robbins’ choreography. Sadly, those undertones never really registered in the duo work presented by Sterling Hyltin and Joseph Gordon; and this is yet another ballet in which getting the steps right is only a fraction of a convincing presentation.
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