For whatever reasons -- and I tend to think it had something to do with the recent departure of the autocratic Peter Martins -- the dancers on Saturday danced with an all-out attack and unusual enthusiasm in three Balanchine ballets: Apollo, Mozartiana, and Cortege Hongrois.
Apollo is an homage to the academic ballet tradition, and the first work in the contemporary classic style, but it is an homage to classicism's sensuous loveliness as well as to its brilliant exactitude and its science of dance effect.
--Edwin Denby, "The New York Herald Tribune," Oct. 23, 1948
Apollo was originally choreographed by Balanchine in 1928 -- his first major ballet -- and never has it seemed more modern than it did on Saturday. Balanchine stripped down and simplified everything, from the costumes to the scenario, emphasizing both the god-like and human aspects of Apollo and his muses: Terpsichore, Polyhymnia, and Calliope. Balanchine worked closely with his friend Stravinsky on the score and as emotional as I find Apollo and other Balanchine ballets I also find them full of reason and austererity, which makes them even more beautiful. As Charles M. Joseph wrote in Stravinsky and Balanchine: a journey of invention (Yale University Press, 2002): Like the myth itself, Apollo engenders a transcendental beauty that touches the core of our spirit in ways that are at once personal and universal.
Set to Tchaikovsky's orchestrations of four compositions by Mozart, it is one of Balanchine's most bountiful creations, and he has achieved it with most uncommonly narrow means. Mozartiana is the world in a bubble.
--Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, Aug. 10, 1981
I have said about other Balanchine ballets that the whole world is in them and I think that that is true of both Apollo and Mozartiana, the difference is that the former is at the beginning of Balanchine's world while the latter is at the end; it was one of his last important ballets, both for himself and for his muse of many years Suzanne Farrell. The ballet has four girls from the School of the American Ballet (started by Balanchine when he first came to America) at its beginning and four women later who represent a later part of life. And there is a gigue danced by a solitary male dancer and a theme and variations danced by the male and female lead. It is a ballet about life, as Balanchine was coming to the end of his. The problem today is that most dancers find the off-balance and asymmetrical turns choreographed for Farrell extremely difficult to pull off. But Saturday Sara Mearns did as good a job as I've seen anyone since Farrell do. And Chase Finlay did well in the part originally done on the relatively slight Ib Andersen, for whom much of the gravity was removed.
I wrote about Cortege Hongrois (post of Oct.16) recently and I was most impressed this time with the speed and ferocity of the dancers' attack. The corps is divided into two groups, one traditional (with the women on pointe) the other doing a version of ethnic folk dances. They seem to be in a way competing with each other for speed and spirit, with Balanchine as he often did, exploring "classes" and individuals and couples in various combinations. The music is from Glazounov's full-length Raymonda and the ballet itself is an exciting and playful tribute to Marius Petipa (who did the first Raymonda choreography), with Balanchine holding off the ballerina's most famous passage -- the plunging releves-passes -- until almost the last minute.
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