Jewels 2/6

[dancingfan]

Just got back from tonight's performance of Jewels. I was so happy that the casting remained intact and there were no last minute changes. Ringer was fabulous in Emeralds, as was Weese. Rubies was definitely a crowd pleaser. Ansanelli was great, she had amazing chemistry with Woetzel and looked like she was having a wonderful time with the role. Reichlen surprised me, although she was shaky at times, she is a beautiful girl with gorgeous long legs. She is definitely someone to watch in the future. Kowrowski and Neal were incredible in Diamonds, Maria's legs are beautiful to watch and her upper body has gotten much more relaxed, her port de bras much more beautiful recently. Neal's turns were fantastic and his jumps were high and light. The only problem that I had with the performance was that the corps was not together in any of the sections, it looked as if they were underrehearsed or that they were not trying to dance as one at all.

On a side note, the person I went with, who has never seen Balanchine performed, commented after Emeralds that in the pas de deux it seemed as if the man wasn't there at all, the woman was the focus and he was an invisible presence. I think Balanchine would be proud.

[bobbi]

I too very much enjoyed last night's Jewels. The new scenery was absoutely wonderful in Emeralds, evoking an elegant world; I felt the opera Pelleas et Meliasande could be sung with this scenery. The Rubies scenery was stunning (and the audience appropriately gasped and applauded as the curtain went up). The scenery for Diamonds didn't appeal to me as much only because I associate Diamonds with the lost world of the Winter Palace, etc. (in other words, indoor grandeur). The new set was more of a celestrial world; more disturbing, the side scrims imposed limits on the corps. But overall kudos to Peter Harvey.

Jennie Ringer and James Fayette turned in as wonderful a performance as I have ever seen in the walking pas de deux in Emeralds. Truly mesmermizing. I thought Miranda did well, but I don't think she's ideal for this role, which calls for exquisite phrasing (but maybe it will stretch her). Both Damian and Alexandra were just terrific in Rubies. I am persnickety about any Patricia McBride role (because she's my all-time favorite ballerina), and last night I found that Alexandra gave an excellent rendition of this role. I agree with DancingFan that the Diamonds needed more rehearsal, but I do think the new scenery constricted the dancers (particularly in the pollinase). Maria had a very respectable debut in Suzanne's role, and I only expect here to get better as time goes on.

See this revived Jewels: you'll have a wonderful evening of ballet.

[dancingfan]

I agree about Weese. While she was lovely, she didn't mesmerize me as she usually does, and I too felt that she was out of place in this role. Perhaps with time she will settle into it. Any suggestions on who would be great in it? I think that Korbes would be wonderful.

[Michael]

Rubies is a wonderful role for Alexandra Ansanelli. She's has an idiosyncratic body and the extreme lines and postures of this ballet look great on her. Those who liked her in Stravinsky Violin Concerto or Polyphonia can imagine how well she looks in this. She danced very big, very clearly and with quick articulation. With strong and fluent musicality as well. She has grown much stronger physically in the last year -- that was obvious. She has the strength of a principal dancer now, and that is not something one could say before.

I have to disagree about Diamonds and about Kowroski. I thought Diamonds was the low point of the evening. Kowroski will grow into this role, I hope, but she was not up to it last night. She danced it as if Diamonds was Odette or the Dying Swan. (She's learned Odette, that's Russian, so she ought to be able to do this, right?). She lacks the quickness, the turns, the balance, the lines, the attack and the passionate presence for this role. One never felt glamour, edge, icyness, strong presence, one never sat at the front of one's seat. At least it wasn't Darci. I shudder to think what this may look like on her at this point in her career. Sylve's injury has made Diamonds difficult to cast at NYCB. Maria K. was, after all, thrown into this at the last minute instead of the big girl in Rubies, which is a role which suits her and which she knows well.

The ensembles in Diamonds do not represent Balanchine working at the top of his talent, I think. Put the Polonaise at the conclusion of Diamonds next to the Polonaise in Theme and Variations, or next to other Polonaises Balanchine choreographed, for comparison, and you can see that in an instant. In Diamonds, he is working in a craftsmanlike manner, but he is repeating himself in a less than inspired mode. Cobbling something together out of the great classical lexicon. There is a lot in the corps de ballet settings and the minor dances for soloists and demisoloists in Diamonds of which that can be said. The principal roles, however, are gems in every sense. For Diamonds to work they must be danced with edge, sparkle, purity and light. Without those qualities Diamonds as a Ballet just doesn't work.

Emeralds was beautiful, feminine, modest and full of perfume last night. Praise to everyone. Loved Weese. And lets not forget Pascale Van Kipnis and Steven Hannah.

[Alexandra]

Thanks to all of you -- we're getting "Jewels" down here in a few weeks, so I'm especially interested in reading who's doing what and how.

Michael, I agree with you on Diamonds. I think Croce wrote something like, it's not top drawer Tchaikovsky, and it wasn't top of the line Balanchine. I think this is one of the differences between Balanchine and Ashton, who wrote some of his most beautiful ballets to mid-level music. Balanchine wouldn't impose his talent or will on the score. I think Verdy said something along those lines, too, that Balanchine was such an honest musician. There's so much good music in that young man's symphony that it was worth choreographing, but putting a heavy polonnaise in at the end wouldn't have been supported by the structure. (??)

[glebb]

I wish I could see Stephanie Saland once more in Emeralds.

Her exquisite powers of hypnotism were so strong when she performed the port de bras solo I think the entire audience had no need to breathe.

[Helene]

But are the Walpurgisnacht Ballet music, Raymonda, pieces by Glinka, the songs in Western Symphony, what Hershey Kay did to Sousa with his orchestrations, etc. top-drawer anything? In my opinion, the only top-drawer music Tchaikovsky wrote is the ballet and vocal music. Was Croce's point that because it was a second-rate score by one of Balanchine's musical gods that Diamonds is it the weakest ballet in Jewels?

I always thought of Diamonds as a bit of an in-your-face vehicle for Farrell: the long adagio, tying in to all of the romantic pieces Balanchine had choreographed for her, a la Meditation., constrasted with a straight, classical bravura piece -- Here's a little nosh my romantic ballerina can eat up for breakfast with all that fancy classical stuff, only faster and better, and tomorrow she's going to dance Movements for Orchestra and the next day A Midsummer Night's Dream, something the ballerinas at a certain company would never do (especially at that time.)

[Helene]

I wish I could see Stephanie Saland once more in Emeralds.   

I totally agree

[Nanatchka]

Helene Alexopolous was beautiful in the Mimi Paul role, I thought. Saland I miss in everything. And Lourdes Lopez. They had temperment, in a good way.

[tempusfugit]

Nanatchka, did you know Saland once did Square Dance? it was good, too. not Wilde, but GOOD. I miss Alexopoulos in everything she ever did, including Agon pdd which I'm not sure she ever got to dance in NYC (saw that when they were touring as two halves)... Saland was ravishing in the arms solo in Emeralds--

Actually, Croce never said all of Diamonds was second-rate. she wrote more than one long article praising Farrell's performances in it to the skies, finding comparisons to Cluny tapestries (unicorn), Swan Lake, and all sorts of interesting things. she found the opening movement pedestrian, which I think many of us might agree on... Many musicians and audience members who AREN"T balletomanes find Tchaik ballets and vocal music third-rate and only the symphonies (and perhaps string concerti) at his highest level. Chacun a son gout.

[Alexandra]

Croce was pretty hard on Diamonds. "If much was expected, much was promised." She was writing some decades ago and comparing it to other, greater, similar works in the repertory. As I remember it, and I havne't read it in years, it was the overall structure, not the pas de deux, that she felt weren't up to snuff. I remember the Farrell piece, too, but that was about the way it was danced.

[Juliet]

Sorry, the third symphony is my favourite one. I prefer the second piano concerto to the first, as well .....

I agree about some of the choreography not being the most exciting, but I can listen to the music, then, and it takes my mind off the fact that I am not watching Wendy Whelan dance Diamonds.....

[Ari]

Yes, I remember that Croce wrote about Diamonds, "Apart from its presentation of the multifaceted Farrell, the ballet is paste." :yes:

[cargill]

I certainly used to feel the corps work in Diamonds was pretty pedestrian, (sort of like my spelling!) until I saw the Kirov do it, and that was an absolute revelation. I really did feel chills up my spine when those legs swooped up, and their upper bodies in the polonaise and the Russian dance were staggeringly beautiful. I wanted it to go on forever. However, that feeling only lasts as long as the Kirov is dancing. It was, I agree, dull dull dull in the recent performances. The pas de deux just seems to come out of nowhere, with no relation to anything else on stage. Though the iceberg sets don't help. I really like Kowroski's take on the pas de duex, it did seem very related to her Swan Lake, very mysterious and haunted, but that is what the choreogrpaphy is. Kistler I liked very much too (she was dancing very well--no not the Kistler of years ago, but she was beautiful), but it didn't look like the same choreography, not because she did different steps, but because she made it suit her--it was just so profoundly happy. I think either approach works, as long as it comes from the dancer.

[dirac]

Croce was hardest on "Diamonds" when the ballet was new -- that was when she suggested it wasn't so much a homage to Petipa as a homage to Gorsky. I think the piece tempusfugit mentions was much later -- the "triptych" article.

hockeyfan228 has a point – if Balanchine could compose top-drawer choreography only to top-drawer music, he never would have gone near most of Tchaikovsky. I don't recall Croce ever saying anything like that, offhand. (She did comment on Ashton's regular use of inferior scores, but judging from the context I don't think she intended it quite as a compliment.)

[Michael]

Mary -- Interesting that you should have thought of the Kirov's corps de ballet here in Summer 2002 in comparison to this week's Diamonds. Because while watching Kowroski attempt the principal role, it was Daria Pavlenko's image which (similarly) haunted me.

This role is more than just a pas de deux. It is more than just an adagio. It requires that the principal dancer hold the stage and have a complete, or at least a commanding technical control of herself and of her lines. To be Regal, It must not appear Laborious.

Maria K is all over the place in terms of her lines and her technical facility generally -- even in supported adagios, not to mention codas full of fast turns and demi pliees and changes of tempo such as this role contains. At her best she is a Picasso or Matisse Ballerina to the Classical lines of Rembrandt, Boucher or Fragonard. Love her as I may (and do) there are too many moments in this role which are too exposing of both the limits of her physical facility and of what is peculiar and unclassical about her native lines. I think the role is better cast upon a slightly smaller more physically capable dancer and I think she is miscast in it.

In the recent Danceview someone opined that Maria was in some sense the natural heiress of Farrell's repertory. My Gosh I question that statement. Kowroski may dance some of Suzanne's roles very well (though I can't think of one right now) -- But she is very, very different in her physical capabilities and style of movement.

[Paul Parish]

I wish I could comment on Michael's remarks, but no having seen Kowrowski, I can't say.

But I must agree with Mary Cargill -- indeed, I think SanFrancisco Ballet's corps dances diamonds so much better than City Ballet did when I saw them last, but there's nothing like hte Kirov corps in the first movement -- it's enormously satisfying, like hte corps in the last act of Ashton's Swan Lake -- I could watch them forever, Odette doesn't need to rush in with her tragedy, their sad idyll is so beautiful. But beyond that, their performance of the polonaise brought to mind the finale of Agon, the fugal passages are so thrilling -- no other company had ever danced it clearly enough to make me see its structure (well, maybe it was me -- it could always be that I finally was rady to see that part of hte ballet) -- this was especially so the night Lopatkina danced the ballerina -- she was as fascinating as Pavlenko in the Adagio, but MUCH more exact and exciting in the scherzo, and the whole ballet kept building that night, so the finale really blew your head off -- on nights when he scherzo falls flat -- which I believe may also have been a not infrequent occurrence at NYCB, given the stories I've heard about the scherzo being omitted sometimes when hte ballerina wasn't up to it -- the finale may have had no peaks on the through-line and seemed like paste raher than gem-like....... But i haven't seen it enough to be very confident of that notion......

[carbro]

Paul, I remember Scherzo omissions only when the danseur was "not up to it," those being the late Diamonds performances by Jacques d'Amboise.

[tempusfugit]

Michael, I liked your observations about Kowrowski; I think it's often forgotten just how strong Farrell was, and how hard that sometimes makes it to cast her roles.

Meditation is formidably difficult, but anyone who saw Farrell in it remembers incorporeal and unearthly subtlety-- not the hellish off-center pirouettes. Until Farrell revived it for Christina Fagundes a few years ago I don't believe it had been danced by another ballerina. The only Farrell role which seemed to suit Kowrowski (in which I've seen her, of course) is Slaughter, and if you saw the Balanchine doc on PBS you know that really belonged to Zorina! smile Getting back to Jewels--and Diamonds in particular-- I agreed fervently with both Paul Parish and Mary Cargill that the Kirov's corps work in Diamonds was revelatory (Pavlenko was no slouch either) and THAT kind of dancing from the entire ensemble, as much as a brilliant ballerina, makes Diamonds into at least semiprecious material. All Balanchine's dazzling bows to the Maryinsky (Theme and Variations, Tchaikovsky Concerto, etc.) need that radiance in epaulement and deportment in order not to look like rhinestones.

[Alexandra]

I'll second (or is it third or fourth?) the vote for the Kirov corps in "Diamonds." I like them in "Theme" as well, but here they caught the atmosphere of the piece and clarified the ballet for me. When NYCB does it, I always got a whiff of a story which went overboard when the corps came at the end, after the final pas de deux. (The "Balanchine is such an honest musician that he's never better than his music" theory.) But when the Kirov does it, somehow -- and I have no idea how -- when the corps makes its entrance there is a finality about it, and such a different atmosphere that I realized the reason they're wearing gloves: everything that happens now in the ballet is public; what went before was private.

Re Kowroski and Farrell, I think many people thought that Kowroski would inherit Farrell's roles -- you're not going to put her in McBride's! -- in the same way that that was thought about Ashley and Nichols, though both were very different dancers than Farrell.

[Drew]

I agree that the Kowroski/Farrell comparison misses the the mark in many ways -- and when I have seen Kowroski in certain Farrell roles, I have also felt that those roles just showcased her limitations...but I did want to add that one of the most beautiful and (for me) most moving performances I ever saw Kowroski give WAS in a Farrell role: the 'muse' figure Farrell created in Robert Schumann's Davidsbundlertanze. By no means did she look like Farrell in the role, but it was a case of her inheriting that repertory and being able to give it 'new' life.

[tempusfugit]

And indeed Ashley and Nichols did dance most of Farrell's big roles : Brahms-Schoenberg, Diamonds, Chaconne, Vienna Waltzes, Mozartiana, Tzigane (Nichols appeared in all of these and Ashley in some) but, of course, were not Farrell, any more than any dancer in the company now is Ashley or Nichols. It's unfortunate that companies often seek to 'recreate', or clone, great ballerinas-- and how many times have we read critics to the tune of "The next Fonteyn! the next Farrell! the next Sublimova!" I agree with Toni Bentley-- "They are forever trying to replace people. Replace Suzanne Farrell or Patricia McBride?"

[bobbi]

A small note about omitting the Scherzo section of Diamonds: During the 70s there were many, many a time when Peter and Suzanne omitted it, particularly at the old 1 p.m. Sunday matinee performances. I don't know why. It certainly wasn't because they weren't "up to it." But it used to be a running bet with other balletomanes whether they would do the scherzo or not.

[oberon]

You are right, Tempus, to point out that every dancer is unique. Kyra is not Suzanne, nor is Maria...and even though Yvonne Borree looks a bit like Mazzo, and Megan Fairchild looks a bit like both of them, they don't have much else in common.

I always try to let each dancer stand on her/his own in a given ballet. Yes, it is hard to forget McBride as Swanilda or Verdy in certain parts, or any of the other wonderful dancers I've seen over the years. But recently I have seen Ringer, Weese and especially Wendy bring something fresh and dazzling to certain parts and I woudn't trade those experiences for anything.

Instead of wanting a "new" or "the next" ________________ (fill in the blank), I want to see each dancer be herself and show us the ballets on her own terms. Otherwise, it's a museum...

[Thalictum]

I think the reason for the Scherzo cancellations may very well have been that they weren't feeling up to it that day; each was thirty plus by that point and Farrell had a bad knee and perhaps didn't want to jump.