A Weak Balanchine-Stravinsky Ballet

Since I find myself writing about ballet, this afternoon I decided to go back to seeking out videos on the Internet to spend some more time examining the partnership of choreographer George Balanchine with composer Igor Stravinsky. I must confess that my personal favorite from this repertoire is the “Rubies” movement from Balanchine’s Jewels trilogy. This was one of my first serious encounters with the Balanchine repertoire when I saw it performed in Saratoga in the summer of 1967. What struck me most about “Rubies” was its unabashedly raucous sense of humor and the unbridled joie de vivre that Patricia McBride and Edward Villella brought to their leading roles.

Many years later I would have an equally deep response to Balanchine’s setting of Stravinsky’s “Duo Concertante.” Balanchine created this dance for the 1972 Stravinsky Festival, but I did not become aware of it until I saw it on television. The ballet was created for Kay Mazzo and Peter Martins, and they appeared on a film by Hugo Niebeling, jointly produced by Unitel and the ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, second German television) public television channel. This was probably my first encounter with a Balanchine ballet that did not try to hide intense passion.

That same Festival included another setting of Stravinsky’s music that paired Mazzo and Martins; and, in the Dance in America video on YouTube, they are joined by a second couple of Karin von Aroldingen and Bart Cook (who had replaced Jean Pierre Bonnefoux, who had just left New York City Ballet). The title of this ballet was “Stravinsky Violin Concerto,” named after the music Balanchine had selected for his choreography. Sadly, this ballet did not register with the impact of either “Rubies” or “Duo Concertante,” having neither the wit of the former nor the intense passion of the latter.

Curiously, Stravinsky did not like violins very much. Nevertheless, there is much to engage the attentive listener in both “Duo Concertante” and the violin concerto. Perhaps, for reasons we may never know, Balanchine was never engaged with the concerto as he was with the duo. Mind you, there is no shortage of jaw-dropping elegant “mechanics” in the interplay among both the soloists and the moderately-sized “chorus.” However, on that YouTube recording it seems as if everyone is going about business-as-usual without allowing any expressiveness to bubble up to the surface.

Given how many choreographic settings of Stravinsky’s music were packed into that 1972 Festival, one could easily speculate that, at some point, Balanchine began to run out of steam in summoning up imaginative choreography; perhaps “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” was his way to telling the Festival audience, “Enough is enough!”