The extraordinary program consisted of three ballets by Balanchine -- Divertimento No. 15, Allegro Brillante, The Four Temperaments -- and Jerome Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun.
Unpredictable and fantastic the sequences are in the way they crowd close the most extreme contrasts of motion possible -- low lunges, sharp stabbing steps, arms flung wide, startling lifts at half height, turns in plie, dragged steps, reverences and strange renverses; then an abrupt dazzle of stabbing leaps or a sudden light and easy syncopated stepping. -- Edwin Denby, "The Four Temperaments," Dance News (Dec. 1946)
It is the ballet that, more than any other, defines the idealism of the classical style as Balanchine sees it. Of course, we know that perfection is impossible -- that no cast will ever completely realize the vision that Balanchine holds before us -- but it is important to feel this as the tension of idealism, and not as the strain of inadequacy. -- Arlene Croce on Divertimento No. 15, The New Yorker (Jan. 30, 1978)
There have been a number of improvements at NYC Ballet since Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan took over, particularly in the casting, as we saw on Saturday, including Unity Phelan and Indiana Woodward in Divertimento No.15, Sterling Hyltin in Afternoon of a Faun, Tiler Peck in Allegro Brillante and Ashley Hod in The Four Temperaments.
Three of the four ballets in this program were from the 50's and one, The Four Temperaments, from the 40's, but they all looked both modern and classical, in excellent shape and beautifully danced. My ten-year-old daughter (who takes regular ballet classes) was particularly fond of Allegro Brillante because of its speed and all the steps it contained (Balanchine once said that in thirteen minutes it contained everything he knew about classical ballet). Divertimento No. 15 is the only surviving ballet Balanchine did to Mozart's music, Allegro Brillante is to Tschaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 3 in E-flat major and The Four Temperaments is done to a score by Hindemith that Balanchine commissioned himself and paid for with money he earned from Broadway shows he choreographed. The music for Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun is by Debussy and the ballet is influenced by but quite different from Nijinsky's original ballet of 1912.
Each ballet from this program took us into a different world, from the world of 18th century courtliness in Divertimento No. 15 to two dancers in a dance studio in Afternoon of a Faun, a world of 19th century classical ballet in Allegro Brillante and finally to the rituals of perhaps a vanished civilization in The Four Temperaments, all evoked by intense solo dancing, pas de deux and an impressive corps de ballet.
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