This past Monday Lincoln Center At Home released its latest YouTube video, entitled All Balanchine. Readers may have observed that there was much to keep me busy this past week, so this morning provided my first opportunity to check out this offering. The YouTube site will be active until July 14, so there is still plenty of time for readers to decide whether or not they agree with my opinions!
Unless I am mistaken all of the All Balanchine content comes from PBS programs of performances by the New York City Ballet (NYCB). The video begins with three highlights from the Balanchine 100 Centennial Celebration program, which was broadcast in 2004. These are followed by the third (and final) act of the full-length ballet Coppélia in the version that Balanchine created in partnership with his former (the second) wife Alexandra Danilova, which was broadcast on PBS in 1978.
Because watching All Balanchine turned out to be far more disappointing than I had anticipated, I feel obliged to follow the lead-with-what-you-liked rule. Since that experience came near the end of the entire program, readers may appreciate how much impact it had in reviving my interest! The performance in question was the pas de deux for the leading characters of the Coppélia scenario, Swanhilda and Franz, who are married by the village mayor at the very beginning of the act. The dancers were Patricia McBride and Helgi Tomasson, for whom the roles were originally created; and, to set the record straight, the entire third act of this production was choreographed by Balanchine himself.
When I examine his repertoire, I find it relatively easy to come away with the impression that Balanchine never particularly liked full-evening narrative ballets. (The closest he ever got to Swan Lake was his own take on the second act, which is frequently performed on its own.) Thus, it may well be that the Coppélia grand pas de deux provided the best opportunity for a virtuoso display of elegant abstractions that rises above all the trappings of narrative that surround it. McBride and Tomasson had no trouble dispensing with any of the personality traits of their respective roles. Instead, they let Balanchine be Balanchine; and the result was an oasis in a parched desert of banalities.
To be fair, however, the overall context for that pas de deux was disconcertingly sold short by the video production team. I had the good fortune to see this Coppélia in the New York State Theater in 1974, during the first season in which it was performed. Whatever the shortcomings may have been, the production, taken in its entirety, was a visual feast; and the third act amounted to a rich dessert course beyond my wildest dreams. The act itself is often known as the “Festival of the Bells;” and a rich array of bells hung over the entire stage. These proved to be a source of wit, since each bell had its own inscription, inviting the viewer to decode each of the strings of initial letters. As might be guessed, the camera work never captured this level of detail, probably because the video team decided that they were not even going to try to do justice to this humorous gesture.
This is where I lead the reader into the slough of dissatisfaction, since poor decisions behind the video capture tended to undermine whatever virtues the rest of the program had to offer. The most egregious error was in the Centennial Celebration part of the program. It involved the appearance of Wynton Marsalis as guest artist during the performance of “The Man I Love” from Balanchine’s “Gershwin ballet” “Who Cares?,” which was seen in its entirety at the beginning of this month in another Lincoln Center at Home offering. There were too many occasions when the camera preferred to dwell of Marsalis, rather than the pas de deux being danced by Alexandra Ansanelli and Nilas Martins. Mind you, this was a matter of adding insult to injury, since Marsalis took such extensive liberties with the rhythms of this particular Gershwin song that it was a wonder that these two dancers could do justice to Balanchine’s choreography as well as they did.
The most satisfying Centennial offering was the second movement of “Concerto Barocco,” a ballet that interested me so much that, on June 17, I wrote a piece about a film of this ballet that John Clifford had uploaded to YouTube. The entire ballet was set to Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1043 concerto for two violins in D minor, whose second movement has a Largo ma non tanto tempo. Balanchine conceived this as a pas de deux “embedded” in ensemble dancing, associating each of the two dancers with one of the violins. The duo work was elegantly executed by Maria Kowroski and James Fayette. However, it is worth observing that the elegance of their execution may well have been motivated by the equally elegant violin performances of the two Juilliard students recruited for this occasion, Gil Shaham and his wife Adele Anthony.
The remaining offering was another work that I had previously seen at the New York State Theater, “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.” The title refers to the orchestration that Arnold Schoenberg composed for Johannes Brahms’ Opus 25 piano quartet in G minor. Balanchine was clearly fascinated with Schoenberg over the course of his career; and the original plan for Jewels apparently included a “Sapphire” movement, which would have been based on Schoenberg’s music. Where Brahms is concerned, Balanchine had created “Liebeslieder Walzer,” setting music from the composer’s Opus 52 and Opus 65 and having the dancers share the stage with the vocal quartet and two pianists. That ballet was first performed in 1960, and “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet” was first performed in 1966.
I have to confess that my first encounter with this ballet left me more than a little perplexed. I knew about Schoenberg’s orchestration, but I had never heard it performed. For that matter, I was entirely unfamiliar with the Brahms source, as was the case where most of his chamber music involved during the Sixties. The only movement that registered with me in the choreography was the concluding “Rondo alla zingarese” (gypsy rondo). This involved a corps of sixteen gypsies (eight women and eight men), led by soloists, Suzanne Farrell and Jacques d’Amboise in the debut performance.
Wendy Whelan and Damian Woetzel in “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet” (screen shot from the video being discussed)
Fortunately, I was able to watch the Centennial video with much richer background of both Brahms and Schoenberg. Only that final movement was performed on the video, and I came away with the impression that there was too much sameness in Balanchine’s lexicon for this particular piece. The leading parts were taken by Wendy Whelan and Damian Woetzel. They tended to bring more energy to their parts than the ensemble ever mustered. However, Farrell and d’Amboise (particularly the latter) were not shy in suggesting that Schoenberg was having more than a little fun in his innovative approach to arranging Brahms, while the Centennial video seemed to come across with more of a sense of business-as-usual.
One of the impressions that has emerged since I started writing at length about Balanchine at the beginning of the NYCB “Digital Spring Season” is that, in the “post-Balanchine” world, there is considerable variation in the interpretation of his work, even under NYCB auspices. All Balanchine emerges as a profile of just how wide that variation is. Sadly, it feels as if the liabilities are overtaking the assets, if they have not already done so.
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