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.
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