We saw three wonderful Balanchine ballets on Sunday. First was Concerto Barocco.
At the climax, against a background of chorus that suggests the look of trees in the wind before a storm breaks, the ballerina, with limbs powerfully outspread, is lifted by her male partner. lifted repeatedly in narrowing arcs higher and higher. Then, at the culminating phrase, from her greatest height he very slowly lowers her. You watch her body slowly descend, her foot and leg pointing stiffly downward, till her toe reaches the floor and she rests her full weight at last on this single sharp point and pauses. It is the effect at that moment of a deliberate and powerful plunge into a wound, and the emotion of it answers strangely to the musical stress.
--Edwin Denby on Concerto Barocco, The New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 16, 1945
I love Concerto Barocco for many reasons, including its surface simplicity over choreography of elegant complexity and its deep understanding of Bach's Double Violin Concerto in d minor, but I also fantasize that I could do the male role, the only male in a ballet that includes ten women. After all, no complicated leaps or turns are involved. Of course I am fooling myself, because the male role in the adagio --beautifully danced by Ask la Cour on Saturday -- is, like all of the ballet, a complexity obscured by its surface simplicity, much like Bach's music. Ashley Laracey and Teresa Reichlen danced the lead roles, each playing off of the violins in beautiful ways and interacting with the corps as a comment on the relationship of the two lead violins to the rest of the orchestra.
Next on the program was Agon, to Stravinsky's music:
Balanchine heard the rhythmic variation of Agon's many musical canons and visualized them inventively, not just imitatively.
---Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky and Balanchine: a journey of invention.
Agon is Greek for contest or gathering and there is much of both in Stravinsky's music and Balanchine's ballet. The famous pas de deux, originally danced by Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams in1957, was danced on Saturday by Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle and implied both a competition and an intense physical relationship. Balanchine was far ahead of his time not only in the original black and white couple but in all eight women in the ballet asserting their sexuality and power. The ballet has a dizzyingly number of combinations of men and women --duos, trios quartets--asserting complicated relationships, with four men at the beginning and ending with their backs to the audience.
The third ballet was The Four Temperaments.
As a conception for a ballet, the four temperaments, or humors of the blood, have been realized with a profundity that doesn't depend on the intellectual powers of either the audience or the dancers.
--Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, Dec. 8, 1975
Hindemith's score for The Four Temperaments was commissioned by Balanchine himself with money he had received from his Broadway choreography and the ballet premiered on Nov.. 20, 1946. Each time I see this ballet I plan to concentrate on what distinguishes the separate temperaments --melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic, choleric -- but I always get caught up in the strange and compelling beauty of the piece, with its Egyptian and other foreign motifs and its unusual movement of bodies. Perhaps it was a mistake to put this on the same program with the Stravinsky -- since the two modern composers can seem dated compared to Bach -- but the ballet truly soars in its ritualistic climax, with some bodies lifted high into the air and others flat on the ground.
No comments:
Post a Comment