American Ballet Theatre Oct. 20, 2018

Most readers of this blog know my preference for NYC Ballet, but Saturday the American Ballet Theatre was performing Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante so we went:  my wife Susan, son Gideon, daughter Victoria and me.  ABT was performing their brief Fall season at The New York State Theatre --instead of the cramped City Center -- and we had nice seats in row B of the 4th ring, no longer sold by NYC Ballet for subscriptions.

Symphonie Concertante was beautifully and elegantly danced by Stella Abrera, Gillian Murphy, and Alexandre Hammoudi, the lone male in the cast.  The music was Mozart's --Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major for Violin and Viola -- and there was much lovely entwining of the three leading dancers while the corps did port de bras and tendus surrounding them. This ballet was originally done for students of the School of American Ballet in 1945 and on Maria Tallchief and Tanaquil Le Clercq for NYC Ballet in 1947.  My feeling is that it was dropped by Balanchine at NYC Ballet because it was too similar to Symphony in C (use of the corps) and Concerto Barocco (use of two female leads and one male), the former premiering in 1947 and the latter in 1941. Also, Balanchine did a very different sort of ballet to Mozart music in 1956:  Divertimento Number 15.  Until this week ABT had not performed Sinfornia Concertante since 2007, perhaps because they did not have enough dancers with the requisite Balanchine technique; it requires twenty-five dancers, all of whom performed Saturday with intensity and passion.

Garden Blue was performed next, choreographed by Jessica Lang, a former member of Twylas Tharp's group.  It was done to playful Dumky (using Slavic epic ballads) music, Dvorak's Piano Trio No.4 in E minor.  There was a somewhat playful aspect to Lang's choreography, very much in the Martha Graham/Paul Taylor school of dance and rather arbitrary in its relationship to the music.  The costumes and set were by Sarah Crowner, the costumes unitards of bright colors and the set including strange wing-like constructions that the dancers hid in and behind.

The final dance was Fancy Free, choreography by Jerome Robbins and music by Leonard Bernstein.  This piece has always seemed to appeal to those who like Broadway dance and vaudeville, which does not include me.  Edwin Denby wrote about it (when it premiered in 1944), "If you want to be technical you can find in the steps all sorts of references to our normal dance-hall steps, as they are done from Roseland to the Savoy: trucking, the boogie knee drop, even a round-the-back done in slow motion."  (New York Herald Tribune, April 19, 1944).  Denby even points out the parodies of Tudor and Massine in the dance, something not obvious to audiences today.  My daughter liked it "because it had a story" (which eventually became part of On the Town, on Broadway in 1944 and in a movie in 1949).