Last night began the three-week run of streaming a video of San Francisco Ballet (SFB) performing the three ballets that George Balanchine collected under the title Jewels. Balanchine was apparently inspired by an encounter with jeweler Claude Arpels and his impressive collection of precious stones. The influences of emeralds, rubies, and diamonds each inspired a distinctive approach to abstract ballet, not only through the choreography but also through the choice of music for that choreography.
Simply put, each type of stone reflected the influence of a country and a particular style associated with that country. Balanchine saw the emeralds as evoking France at the end of the nineteenth century and an association with the music of Gabriel Fauré. The rubies were more fiery, suggesting an unbridled American spirit compatible with the raucous rhetoric of Igor Stravinsky. Finally, the diamonds summoned memories of Imperial Russia and the ballet traditions associated with the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Each ballet emerged as a gem unto itself, so to speak; and both “Diamonds” and “Rubies” have been performed on their own, either excerpted or in their respective entireties. Nevertheless, while these is no overarching logic, these three ballets fare best when incorporated into the entire Jewels framework.
Jewels was first performed by the New York City Ballet (NYCB) at the New York State Theater on April 13, 1967, during the final semester of my senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I gave myself a graduation present by going out to Saratoga that summer to see NYCB perform Jewels in its “summer residence;” and I was hooked from beginning to end. SFB added the ballet to its repertoire and first performed it on March 12, 2002.
The video currently being streamed is a composite of three different performances. The film of “Emeralds” is new, having been recorded in the War Memorial Opera House this past January 28. The film of “Rubies” was made in 2016 and that of “Diamonds” was made the following year. It is thus possible that these three separate recordings do not constitute a coherent vision of the entire collection. Whether or not that is the case, there was a decidedly uneven level of basic technical quality across the three performances.
“Diamonds” was by far the most satisfying offering, perhaps because it is most compatible with the techniques of classical Russian ballet that serve as the primary foundation of the SFB dancers. Balanchine set “Diamonds” to the last four of the five movements of Tchaikovsky’s Opus 29 (third, sometimes known as the “Polish”) symphony in D major. (Balanchine saw the first movement as unsuitable for choreography; and, as far as I am concerned, he made the right call!)
Sasha De Sola and Tiit Helimets performing the “Diamonds” pas de deux (photograph by Erik Tomasson, choreography by George Balanchine © The Balanchine Trust, courtesy of San Francisco Ballet)
The heart of the choreography resides in the pas de deux adagio set to the third (Tchaikovsky’s count) movement, following the context established by the corps de ballet in the preceding Alla tedesca movement. There is a prevailing rhetoric of melancholy but without any excess of grief. The Scherzo then provides a platform for the male and female variations, sharing the stage first with the four cygnets from Swan Lake and later with four men to partner those cygnets. The Finale movement then ties everything together in one coherent package with jaw-dropping minimal choreography for the chorale that wraps up the movement. The SFB performance effectively captured every aspect of this choreographic journey, reminding all serious viewers of just how imaginative Balanchine could be in setting Tchaikovsky’s music.
Of course Balanchine was equally imaginative in his approach to Stravinsky, but you might not guess that on the basis of the SFB performance of “Rubies.” The issue involves a historical perspective that probably never registered with the mounting of this ballet in San Francisco. That history dates back to 1936, when Balanchine provided the choreography for a Broadway show by Richard Rodgers, George Abbott, and Lorenz Hart entitled On Your Toes. The plot involved a troupe of out-of-work Russian ballet dancers who get recruited to perform a jazz ballet called “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” The production played up the dissonant relationship between Russian traditions and brash American styles.
I like to think of On Your Toes as a story of traditional Russian ballet dancers that get stuck in a jazzy setting. “Rubies” turns this premise on its head. Imagine, instead, a troupe of jazz dancers that do most of their work in Las Vegas suddenly transplanted into the New York City Ballet. As they struggle to learn new steps, every now and then a limb or a hip flays out in some unlikely direction. This was the spirit that Edward Villella and Patricia McBride brought to the premiere of “Rubies,” both as soloists and “leaders of the pack” of the other dancers. Sadly, while Pascal Molat and Mathilde Froustey may have been true to the original steps, they never captured the jazzy dissonances in style that were so well-served by Igor Stravinsky’s capriccio for piano and orchestra.
Even more disappointing, however, was “Emeralds.” Balanchine set his choreography to two sources of Fauré’s music, both intended as incidental music for dramas, one about Pelléas and Mélisande and the other about Shylock (as in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice). I do not think that Balanchine had previously set any Fauré; and it is clear that, in “Emeralds,” he was more sensitive to mood than to structure. However, the mood was his own, meaning than any narrative connotations that Fauré had conceived for his music were abandoned (if they were even considered in the first place).
Nevertheless, there is much to admire in Balanchine’s approach to mood. Unfortunately, the SFB performance rarely aligned their execution to any of the aspects of that mood. Thus, we had choreography detached from the music and dance detached from the choreography. The results were disappointing at best; and, at worst, they ventured too close to the brink of downright annoying.
Perhaps the entire Jewels vision is more suited to the twentieth-century worldview. The choreography can be reconstructed, but the dispositions behind all of that choreography are more elusive. In my own case I fear that the entire evening is more vivid in memory than it is ever likely to be in present-day performance.
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