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WEEK 7: Tributes to Lincoln


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At the Thurs. eve., June 7 performance, when the curtain rose on SERENADE, the familiar "rows of orange trees" the dancers were SAB students wearing dark blue lycra practice clothes, with a short skirt. They performed the first movement, and then the company dancers came on, in the Karinska (I confess I'm not totally positive about that, and the website does not credit the current ones) costumes. Kistler had the same problems as at the other performance I saw, and I feel that Maria Korowski suited the role more than Mears. Once again, the music emanated from Ashley Bouder's miraculous body.

What a difference the costume made! It changed the light, the spacing and the way everything looked. The geometry of the composition was so much clearer without all that tulle. Don't get me wrong, I love the long costumes, but it was such a revelation to see the bodies. In all likelihood, the movement of their arms was abbreviated, because they had no long skirts to manipulate and toss around. A very interesting experiment.

LES GENTILHOMMES was performed with clarity and grace by boys from SAB. I heard from people who had seen it at the workshop that this performance was better than the one they saw previously. They were poised, proud and dignified. I remember the original production, with a wonderful crop of young corps dancers, and have long waited for it's reappearance. It's not the greatest of ballets, but it so beautifully shows the abilities and brilliance of the performers that it should be done more frequently. Wonderful footwork! Let's see more.

UNION JACK was, well, UNION JACK! Reliably interesting and entertaining, wonderful dancing -- how about Ashley Bouder in MacDonald of Sleat??

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Sunday, June 10, 2007

A Lioness, and Holy Water

After three of those notorious SB's across the plaza, even the interspersed Philharmonic's Brahms Requiem and Lang Lang's Emperor were insufficient medicine, and so I came to NYCB for cleansing, and was cured.

Walpurgisnacht began the afternoon and is now so restored by Sara A. Mearns that it could fix a thousand fiascos. If ever you have the chance, see this minor Balanchine wonder. Regarding that SB, I am so thankful for the beauty of our Sleeping Beauty, I've seen Lilac Mearns tell the whole story on her own! Also in this cast is NYCB future Aurora Ana Sophia Scheller, again classical perfection and restraint in the role of Petipa Ballerina. In my favorite mini-role for her, Alina Dronova had the flawless Fairy form that would help make any 'Beauty glow, and Rachel Piskin offered perfect contrast as her fellow demi. But Ballet-is-Mearns. Everything is daring, last year's Ms. Adagio is this year's angelic Daredevil. After that now famous hairific diagonal, there she is center stage, and she spots Ask la Cour front and toward her right. A Cheshire look crosses the face of this Lioness. She charges, mane aflight, then somewhere during that first preparation jump transforms, a panther pounces onto his shoulder. These are special times at NYCB, as Sara A. and Ashley are charging into Balanchine. Add the recently reenergized Tess Reichlen, and sensational newbies, and things are looking up for the old geezer.

Tears

As an immensely intense Liebeslieder approached its half-time break, Kyra was dancing that duet of great sadness with Nilas Martins with overwhelming emotion, it neared completion--and then her tears could not quite wait.

Her second half was one great arc of feelings beyond words. Were there more tears? Perhaps my own eyes were in an insufficient state of clarity to testify.

In the pointe half Darci joined Kyra in emotion. I thought she was dazzling too, but then I always read "No" about her in Liebeslieder, yet alway experience "Yes." It fell to Jenifer Ringer to grant us a moment of tranquility, with Nikolaj Hubbe, and then they burst into ballet to bring us home. The dancers were Darci Kistler, Kyra Nichols, Rachel Rutherford, Jenifer Ringer, Jared Angle, Nikolaj Hubbe, Nilas Martins, Philip Neal. Women first, and alphabetical. The way it has always been.

Kyra left it all on that stage today. And why not? It is hers.

That wonderful Stravinsky conductor Nicolette Fraillon concluded with his Symphony in Three Movements. But my eyes were still full of Ms. Nichols.

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We all saw the tears.....and felt them.

I'd just like to add that Megan LeCrone and Adrian LongLastName were wonderful in Symph in 3, and that the pas de 2 by Albert and Abi was really beautifully done. The long line of women at beginning and end of the 1st movement stunned the audience as usual.

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Yes, I agree yesterday afternoon was a delightful one. The only thing that marred it was Darci's performance. I really believe she is not doing herself, the audience and most of all, Mr. Balanchine, any favors by fudging and/or deleting huge chunks of great choreography. I hope she follows Kyra's lead into retirement soon.

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Regarding the Thursday night performance, I found Serenade that night to be hugely disappointing. I'd gone specifically to see Maria, freed from Bugaku and the constraints of block programming, because she is my favorite Dark Angel (I know Sara Mearns has her fans, but I prefer Maria). Maria was the only high point of Serenade that night. First, I much prefer the longer costumes. What a difference they make to the lighting (it seems more diffuse and ethereal with the floating tulle) and the romance of the ballet. While I appreciate the thinking behind opening with SAB students in the "original" costumes, I didn't really appreciate the overall effect at all. The opening "orange grove" scene, for me, was pretty much destroyed. Short skirts do not belong in Serenade. I also found the SAB students pretty stiff. Everyone seemed off, in fact, in that performance. Even Ashley completely missed her opening jump into Stephen's arms in the third movement (when he catches her in mid air). She missed her entire entrance! Nowhere to be found. Stephen was left to improvise. She finally ran onto stage and assumed her arabesque, horribly late, putting him out of his discomfiture. The omission of one of the best moments in Serenade -- it will take me a long time to forgive Ashley for that one! -- (compounded by the horrible lack of atmosphere in the opening scene, and the stiffness of the SAB dancers), contributed to my thorough disappointment. I won't even go in to how badly Darci danced, other than to say she was phoning it in even more than usual.

Thank God for Union Jack, one of the best performances I've seen of it. Especially glorious Tess Reichlen, with her mile high extension and gorgeous legs, just adorably sexy leading the Wrens. Why hasn't she been cast in Serenade? Why is she not a principal? She's a fantastic Balanchine dancer, and Mr. B loved tall dancers (because there was more of them to see!). She's gotten a lot stronger over the last couple of years. It's high time. And I shall never tire of seeing Damian W. I just hope he puts off his planned retirement by at least another few years, he's irreplaceable!

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Have I missed it, or did no one on the board review Wheeldon's new ballet? I would have expected to find reviews here, since it premiered during this time period. If I didn't miss reviews here, how shall I interpret the silence?

You can extract my general opinion from my behavior: I saw it once. I didn't go in the second time I was volunteering and it was on the program.

-amanda

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June 8th: We were really dreading the worst, but the premier of Christopher Wheeldon’s new work “The Nightingale & the Rose” from a short story by Oscar Wilde with music by NYCB’s resident composer, Bright Sheng was especially beautiful. Wendy Whelan is superb in choreography that uses her unique talents – angularity, speed, suppleness. Wendy’s initial solo is a beautifully realized series of avian allusions involving hands, arms, legs, feet and head that clearly establish her as the bird of the title. The subsequent duet with Tyler Angle is wonderfully strange as Tyler captures and powerfully presents Wendy. Her encounter with the red rose bush – first dried and gnarled and then coming to vivid life as she sacrifices her life blood to make it bloom – is poignant and haunting. The bush is first played by two men (Craig Hall & Seth Orza) in dark purple costumes and darkened eye sockets who begin to manipulate Wendy in a series of complex lifts and stretches. Gradually the bush is transformed into 16 men whose costumes also begin to transform into mostly bright scarlet while they support and contort the increasingly inert Wendy among them. The creation of the red rose is a real Wheeldon ‘coup d’theatre’. Some of the rest of the story seems told with perfunctory choreography (the encounters of Tyler & Sara Mearns as his love interest, Wendy’s brief encounters with the white & yellow rose bushes) but the final moments when Tyler presents the rose to Sara, Sara rejects both the rose and Tyler, and Tyler crushes the rose and ignores the body of the nightingale who as given her life to create the rejected rose are poignant and breathtaking. I was concentrating so much on the stage that I can only say that the music was supportive and interesting, but not initially memorable. And the weeping Disney-esque moon seemed to be a false note in an otherwise abstract setting.

The rest of that program was pretty weak – Martins’ “Jeux des Cartes” to Stravinsky is a mish-mash of hectic comings and goings danced by Hyltin, JAngle, Millipied, and Veyette with great commitment and panache, but little impact. It’s nice to see JAngle dancing with full impact again. He’s a wonderful partner and has a lovely, slightly self-effacing stage presence. Balanchine’s “Davidbundlertanz” requires a fully committed cast and an outstanding pianist to be totally successful. The cast seemed about 75% committed, Kyra Nichols, Nicolaj Hubbe, Jennie Ringer among the totally invested and Nilas Martins looking bored and uninvolved. Maria Kowroski was hoydenish in the Farrell role partnered by a subdued, but attentive Philip Neal. Cameron Grant didn’t pull this difficult series of short piano pieces together into a coherent whole, thereby losing the full impact of the dramatic and introspective choreography.

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...the final moments when Tyler presents the rose to Sara, Sara rejects both the rose and Tyler, and Tyler crushes the rose and ignores the body of the nightingale who as given her life to create the rejected rose are poignant and breathtaking...

One might have hoped for more of Sara with Tyler. They've shown partner potential since the SAB performances in 2003. You may find a photo here (click the photo set):

http://www.sab.org/workshopperformances.htm

Mr. Angle was clearly considered a hot prospect then, as he merited at least four of the photos (including Aurora Ana Sophia Scheller's Prince). Odd that 2003 was the last year that SAB's site bothered with the workshop...

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Have I missed it, or did no one on the board review Wheeldon's new ballet? I would have expected to find reviews here, since it premiered during this time period. If I didn't miss reviews here, how shall I interpret the silence?

-amanda

I liked The Nightingale and the Rose (which I saw at the 6/18/07 matinee performance) much more than I expected to based on the initial print reviews. (None of which I actually read “in print,” of course, and one of which – Mary Cargill’s in Dance View Times – doesn’t appear in print at all.*) Many of Wheedon’s recent works for NYCB (Klavier, After the Rain, An American in Paris, and Carousel) have had the feel of extracts rather than complete, stand-alone ballets, and this one is no exception. It could fit comfortably in, say, a suite of fables with some sort of thematic link. (It will fit very comfortably in the “For the Birds” program along with The Firebird and Balanchine’s Swan Lake. Or, alternatively, in the “Birds and Bees” program with The Firebird and The Cage. Or, if done without program notes, the “What the Heck Was That About?” program with Variations Pour Une Porte and Un Soupir and Central Park in the Dark. :clapping: ) I liked Sheng’s score well enough, but it’s not the kind of score that makes you sit up and say “Wow, that would be great dance music!” I thought the costumes and staging were very effective, although I could live without the big eye in the moon on the backdrop. (Very distracting – and I kept thinking of The Great Gatsby).

The ballet’s centerpiece is Wheeldon’s very inventive and very effectively macabre staging of the Nightingale’s interaction with the Red Rose Bush, the latter embodied by a male corps led by two soloists (Craig Hall and an unannounced Adrian Danchig-Waring subbing for Seth Orza) in lots of goth hair gel and make-up. (Personally, I liked the hair gel. NYCB male hairstyles are generally discouragingly dowdy, with a couple of notable exceptions.) It's not particularly "dancy" but then neither is the music. And it's very dark and rather bleak. Anyway, I’d like to see it again.

* Recently, I listened to a podcast in which a panel of print media reviewers whined (there is no kinder way to put it) about the ongoing cut back in independent book reviews in newspapers and how this will inevitably lead to the death of American cultural and intellectual life. At one point, Joan Acocella exclaimed “Who reads reviews on line!” apparently under the impression that the sum total of on-line reviewing consists entirely of amateurs posting their musings on blogs. “Dance View Times! Dance View Times!” I shouted, much to the bemusement of the gentleman standing next to me while we waited to cross Broadway.

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Cameron Grant didn’t pull this difficult series of short piano pieces together into a coherent whole.

How so? this suite of 18 pieces is not very tightly organized to begin with, the only overt coherence being the repetition of #2 in #17. Otherwise they present a loosely structured succession of moods representing what Schumann saw as the two sides of his nature - impulsive Florestan and dreamy Eusebius.

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Cameron Grant didn’t pull this difficult series of short piano pieces together into a coherent whole.

How so? this suite of 18 pieces is not very tightly organized to begin with, the only overt coherence being the repetition of #2 in #17. Otherwise they present a loosely structured succession of moods representing what Schumann saw as the two sides of his nature - impulsive Florestan and dreamy Eusebius.

IMO this is a suite of related pieces which Schumann put together for a reason. Things like the impulsive and dreamy arise from the same individual -- the composer. Unlike Robbins' with "Dances at a Gathering", Balanchine started out with a suite pre-established by the composer as somehow related and it's up to the performer to interpret the 'suite' in a way that helps the listerner find those relationships. In this case, the choreographer has found many relationships for the viewer/listener and overlaid a dance structure on the music, but at this particular performance IMO the pianist didn't aid in the overall process by emphasizing the 'suite' rather than the individual pieces.

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at this particular performance IMO the pianist didn't aid in the overall process by emphasizing the 'suite' rather than the individual pieces.

I can't say I experienced the deficiencies you allege. IMO, Cameron Grant is the strongest of the solo pianists performing for NYCB; I found his work this past Sunday much more satisfactory than the uninflected, workaday account of the Dances at a Gathering pieces presented two weeks ago by Susan Walters. This may not have been a Davidsbuendlertaenze to match the ones by Alfred Cortot or Charles Rosen, to mention my favorite recordings, but I didn't sense any lack of coherence in Cameron's performance. But there's no question of the difficulty of this music for the pianist. I can manage most of them myself on my home piano (just barely), but I expect the balletgoer whose eye is trained to focus on the dancers may not always be aware of how awkward and problematic Schumann's writing is for the pianist.

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I can't say I experienced the deficiencies you allege. IMO, Cameron Grant is the strongest of the solo pianists performing for NYCB; I found his work this past Sunday much more satisfactory than the uninflected, workaday account of the Dances at a Gathering pieces presented two weeks ago by Susan Walters. This may not have been a Davidsbuendlertaenze to match the ones by Alfred Cortot or Charles Rosen, to mention my favorite recordings, but I didn't sense any lack of coherence in Cameron's performance. But there's no question of the difficulty of this music for the pianist. I can manage most of them myself on my home piano (just barely), but I expect the balletgoer whose eye is trained to focus on the dancers may not always be aware of how awkward and problematic Schumann's writing is for the pianist.

I agree with you completely about Walters playing for 'Dances at a Gathering' which seemed barely adequate. Also, I agree that Schumann's piano pieces can be hard to interpret. My real point here is that by placing the pianist on the stage with the dancers. Balanchine has emphasized the importance of the music in the ensemble effort of 'Davidsbundlertanze' and I felt that Cameron Grant's contribution, along with the dancing of Nilas Martins, Philip Neal and Charles Askegard didn't measure up in the performance we attended.

I think that there is very little commentary on this board about the quality of the music at NYCB. This season, the music IMO has been all over the map. I thought that the orchestra under Maestro Karoui at the opening night 'R+J' was the outstanding element of the production. The same score under Maestro Briskin sounded tired and anemic. IMO it was a major mistake to put the piano on stage (in the 'Dances at a Gathering' corner) for 'Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto #2' which made the soloist and orchestra sound out of synch from where we sat. IMO the guest conductor Paul Hoskins was inadequate in both performances we attended where he conducted -- 'Raymonda Variations' came to a near standstill and 'Stravinsky Violin' seemed to be salvaged by Mr. Delmoni's solo violin passages. IMO Maestro Kaplow often makes fine contributions in the classical and romantic repertory pieces, but usually falls short in more contemporary works. For a company that has traditionally put such a high emphasis on the relationship of the dance to the music, we need to be aware of both in reacting to the performances we see or we will some day find ourselves losing this unique tradition.

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