George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983. Having co-founded the New York City Ballet (NYCB) with Lincoln Kirstein, he served as its Artistic Director for more than 35 years and was responsible for creating the lion’s share of the company’s repertoire. It was inevitable that he would be memorialized by his own company with a tribute program that would survey the breadth of Balanchine’s capacity for invention. That program was then broadcast on Public Television as part of the Live From Lincoln Center series.
The program served to embody the wide scope of Balanchine’s interests and the imagination he could bring to all of those interests. The centerpiece of the program was “Mozartiana,” one of his last ballets and, to some extent, his “last word” of reflections on Russian traditions. This was followed by “Who Cares?,” a survey that celebrated American hoofing with the same imaginative capacity for design that had inspired “Mozartiana.” The program began with “Vienna Waltzes,” also a survey, this time of Viennese traditions. For the entire program Robert Irving conducted the NYCB Orchestra.
At the end of last month, NYCB announced that this program would be given a streaming video presentation as part of the Dance Week event organized by Lincoln Center at Home. This stream was scheduled to be presented last night, but its Web page never provided any hyperlinks for viewing the program. Indeed, as of yesterday, that Web page was no longer accessible from the Dance Week home page and was best found by giving Google just the right search keys.
Needless, to say, I was seriously frustrated. I had enjoyed performances of both “Vienna Waltzes” and “Who Cares?” at the New York State Theater; and I have long been curious about “Mozartiana.” Fortunately, I managed to find all three of the 1983 videos on YouTube, allowing me to make my own program through manual ordering of the URLs for “Vienna Waltzes,” “Mozartiana,” and “Who Cares?” All three of these seem to have been made as copies from the original Live From Lincoln Center video, but they were good enough to allow any attentive viewer to appreciate the qualities of Balanchine’s choreography and the impeccable execution skills of NYCB dancers.
“Mozartiana” was the high point for me, probably because it was a “first encounter” experience. The title of the ballet was taken from the subtitle given to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 61 (fourth) orchestral suite. The ballet was originally created in 1933 but re-choreographed for the 1981 Tschaikovsky [sic] Festival. The suite is known as “Mozartiana” because all of the movements involve orchestral arrangements of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This provided Balanchine with a “double whammy,” since his love of Mozart’s music was right up there with the works of Tchaikovsky.
As was the case in “Serenade,” however, Balanchine reordered Tchaikovsky’s movements. He made the bold decision to begin with the suite’s Andante movement, an orchestration of Franz Liszt’s piano transcription of the K. 618 choral motet, “Ave verum corpus.” These were followed by short pieces for solo piano, the K. 574 “Little Gigue” and the K. 355 minuet. The ballet then concluded with the K. 455 set of piano variations on an opera aria by Christoph Willibald Gluck. Balanchine’s decision to begin with the K. 618 setting was a stroke of genius. Most likely conceived as a love letter to Suzanne Farrell, it is both serene and passionate at the same time; and the decision to limit her accompaniment for four young ballet students gave the choreography a somewhat biographical twist.
Suzanne Farrell at the conclusion of the opening movement of “Mozartiana” (screen shot from the video being discussed)
The remainder of the ballet abounded with intricately conceived solo and corps choreography, and the ingenious approach to variations culminated in an exuberant reminder of how much Balanchine loved Mozart’s music.
“Vienna Waltzes,” on the other hand, is decidedly more about the dance than about the music. The score amounts to a pastiche with two waltzes and a polka by Johann Strauss II, followed by Franz Lehár’s “Gold and Silver” waltz and concluding with the first sequence of waltzes that Richard Strauss extracted from his opera Der Rosenkavalier. There is no narrative to speak of in any of these selections, but there is a wide diversity of expressions of how a couple can engage with each other on a dance floor.
For those that know their Lehár, the black dress easily suggests The Merry Widow, as does the intense sexual chemistry between the leading male and female dancers. Similarly, there is a tension in the opening performance of “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” even if Balanchine never reveals the source of that tension. My only real difficulty came with the selection of Rosenkavalier music for the final scene, simply because that opera is so rich with narrative that I found it difficult to experience the music being subjected to an alternative setting.
As might be expected, “Who Cares?” reminds the informed viewer of Balanchine’s experiences on Broadway. As on past occasions, Balanchine turned to Hershy Kay to provide arrangements of George Gershwin’s songs has he had done previously for John Philip Sousa’s marches. The result was energetically entertaining, and I appreciated that Kay almost always took on music for the verse, even if it was less familiar than the chorus. Nevertheless, when compared with some of those earlier “arranged” scores, “Who Cares?” quickly became too much of a good thing. Mind you, I still melt when I watch how Patrica McBride presents “The Man I Love;” but, on the whole, I felt as if much of the heart and soul I had seen in the original cast had not been received by the next generation as lovingly.
As I write this, there is still not a functioning hyperlink for a single video which, according to its Web page, should be available until July 18; apparently “Lincoln Center at Home” is not as keen on good technical management as the NYCB “Digital Spring Season” had been.
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