SFB: British Choreography Disappoints

Last night at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Ballet (SFB) launched its second program for the current season entitled British Icons. The “icons” of that title were two British choreographers both working for the Royal Ballet. Through his career there, Frederic Ashton rose to the position of Chief Choreographer, while Kenneth MacMillan would eventually become Artistic Director. Unfortunately, in the British Icons program, neither of these choreographers was given the opportunity to (if the play on words will be forgiven) put his best foot forward.

The Ashton selection, which occupied the second half of last night’s program, was “Marguerite and Armand.” Like many of his ballets, this one was created explicitly for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. This was a time when tickets for their performances sold like hot cakes; and members of the British public would probably have sold their first-born children for an opportunity to watch that couple dance anything, even if it was just “Mairzy Doats!”

Fortunately, Ashton’s work was much more creative. (He would not have risen to a position of leadership had it not been!) He developed a narrative based on the novel La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils. Those that visit the Opera House during the opera season have probably become familiar with La traviata, which is based on the same source; and anyone acquainted with that opera would have had no trouble following Ashton’s well-crafted abbreviation of that narrative, distilled into a performance set to the music of Franz Liszt’s B minor piano sonata, whose duration is usually somewhat less than half an hour.

Last night the title characters were danced by Misa Kuranaga and Joseph Walsh with Ricardo Bustamante giving an account of Armand’s father. (I kept waiting for him to sing “Di Provenza il mar!”) Britton Day played the piano to an “enhanced” orchestral accompaniment, arranged by Dudley Simpson and conducted by Martin West.

It goes without saying that Verdi is a tough act to follow. Ashton’s “distillation” was a noble effort, but I had to wonder how well his abbreviated narrative would register with those unfamiliar with either Verdi or Dumas. I suppose my greatest disappointment was that this reduced account had little room for allowing the characters to develop. Instead, the key episodes simply marched by, one after another, with a result that felt a bit like soap opera without the commercials. Ashton’s choreography was always at its best when he exercised just the right balance of subtlety and wit. Sadly, neither of these factors played much of a role in “Marguerite and Armand.”

Nevertheless, perhaps due to its relative brevity, I had no trouble sitting through it all without squirming. Sadly, I cannot say the same about the opening MacMillan selection, which was a choreographic setting of Gustav Mahler’s orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, performed under its English title, “Song of the Earth.” According to its Wikipedia page, MacMillan was one of four choreographers to take on Mahler’s music. The others were Antony Tudor (predecessor) and later Heinz Spoerli and John Neumeier. The author of that article cites MacMillan as the only one that succeeded. (Tudor had a habit of biting off more than he could chew, but I always ended up giving him credit for trying.)

Mind you, “success” meant “audience approval;” and, in the most memorable quote from Adam Smith’s The Money Game, “The crowd is always wrong!” There is no apparent evidence that MacMillan ever took the trouble to pay attention to the texts being sung in Mahler’s score. Mind you, those texts were more than a little problematic. Mahler took them from Die chinesische Flöte (the Chinese flute), a collection of free translations into German of classical Chinese poems. Fortunately, over the course of the entire cycle, he was very sparing in lapsing into the idiomatic chinoiserie of pentatonic passages!

Kenneth MacMillan’s “calisthenics” for his “Song of the Earth” ballet (photograph by Lindsey Rallo, © San Francisco Ballet)

Having put aside any “semantic” implications in Mahler’s music, MacMillan used it, instead, to provide a platform for what may best be called “arty calisthenics.” These were precisely synchronized with a technique that exudes disturbing implications of mass exercises performed under the dictatorships of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Every now and then, the calisthenics “turn polyphonic;” but they are consistently rigid in adhering to precise rhythm.

Needless to say, this sort of thing gets tiresome rather quickly. I therefore have no shame in confessing that, more often than not, my eyes were drawn to the right and left corners at the front of the stage. These were the sites where mezzo Gabrielle Beteag and tenor Moisés Salazar respectively sang Mahler’s vocal lines. Both of them displayed a solid command of the score and expressive delivery. By the time the performance had advanced to the final song, “Der Abschied” (the farewell), I was locked into Beteag’s delivery, savoring her every phrase, each of which was impeccably matched by Martin West’s conducting in the orchestra pit.

The fact is that both musicians and vocalists would have done well to take themselves across the street to Davies Symphony Hall and let the dancers fend for themselves with MacMillan’s rigid rhetoric of choreography.