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On Dance:
How well is the Kirov doing at being elite? At the Met, not well at all. It was much too popular. Four principal casts were presented in The Sleeping Beauty; I saw all of them. The Balanchine evening was presented twice, with different casts in all but one ballet; I saw both evenings. Of the handful of casts in Giselle, I saw two; of the three casts in Fountain, I saw one. On the basis of nine performances out of sixteen, then, I can report that as far as audiences were concerned, over half the season, at least, was a rousing success with crowds that, for the Balanchine programs, filled the four thousand-seat house. Most astonishing were the warm receptions accorded The Sleeping Beauty, which has a running time that approaches four hours. Night after night, the audiences had to be prodded to leave the theater. During the performances, their collective concentration only seemed to flag during the third act, a formal wedding divertissement without a narrative incentive to keep the occasional balletgoer (and occasional balletgoers made up most of these audiences) stimulated. Now, by the third act of most productions of this work that I have seen at the Met in the past thirty years, the theater would begin to empty. What kept people in place past the point of pure enchantment? The visual spectacle was astonishing and ingratiating, like an Arts-and-Crafts illustrated children's book come to life; but the magnet was the music. I have heard Tchaikovsky's score played with more delicacy and with much more accommodation to the dancers, yet never with more passion, imagination, and commitment. It was like this from the first chords of galloping thunder in the overture to the majestically composed apotheosis, spreading a song without words across the theater like a canopy. At all four performances, the show-stopping moment was also musical: the "Entr'acte," containing a featured violin part, performed by the coprincipal violinist Alexander Vasiliev, who played from the pit while the curtain was closed. The staging of Vasiliev's performances at the Met appears to be unique in the ballet's production history. When the Kirov dances The Sleeping Beauty at most other theaters, the curtain is open, and audiences see a "Panorama"--a scene showing the Lilac Fairy and Prince Desire voyaging toward the castle of the sleeping Aurora in the fairy's boat. At the Met, the Kirov announced, unrolling scenery for the "Panorama" wouldn't fit. The quick fix of a pure recital riveted the house every time. Invariably, the audience would register some uncertainty that there was nothing to see on stage, then quiet down, listen, and hold its breath for a beat after the final, soaring note before breaking into tumultuous applause. The whole thing was an irony of historical proportions. Violin solos were part of ballet convention in nineteenth-century Russia. In Tchaikovsky's time, the court violinist who played them at the Imperial Theater was the Hungarian virtuoso and teacher Leopold Auer, who emigrated to New York in 1918, where he is still fondly recalled as the teacher of Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, and others. In The Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky wrote a sinuous and grateful part for Auer, so songlike in character that it might almost be called vocalise. But then, one week before the ballet's world premiere, the composer received a telegram ordering him to delete it from Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of Imperial Theaters, who not only co-authored the ballet's libretto and designed its array of fantastical and luxurious costumes, but also conceived the project itself in the first place, bringing Petipa and Tchaikovsky together as collaborators for the first time. Even in a more leisurely era, it seems, the length of the piece was a reason for worry; and so the solo was dispensible, since it did not advance the action. In Diaghilev's landmark production in 1921, the violin solo was also deleted (along with much else, apparently), out of the same concern. Balanchine included it in his production of The Nutcracker in 1954, where it serves what is perhaps the most tender and intimate moment of the first Act, where Marie's mother, finding Marie asleep with the injured Nutcracker on the drawing-room sofa, takes off her own shawl and throws it over the child rather than awakening her. And now, after a century of exile from its intended setting, this "Entr'acte" returned in its full spotlighted glory in New York. It proved to be so powerful on its own terms that the Kirov musicians were as stunned as the Met audiences. At the conclusion of each rendition of it, the conductor--Gianandrea Noseda, a native of Milan, who was appointed by Gergiev in 1997 as the Maryinsky's principal guest conductor--gave Vasiliev a bear hug. Even Noseda seemed unable quite to believe that when Tchaikovsky speaks directly to an audience, without distraction, in a good performance, the audience will pay attention and be deeply moved--that even within Tchaikovsky's ballets, one can take away the dancers and still have a spellbinding theatrical poetry. In some way, Tchaikovsky had finally won with the public at large. It was one of those events when the world giddily turns upside-down and one's thinking about what is possible changes forevermore, like the Mets winning the World Series in 1969. The production was replete with visual sensations, too. The sets and the costumes exploded with riotous colors, impossibly detailed sets (including a working fountain), costumes and props of such fantasy that they seem to have leaped off a deck of Tarot cards, and three completely stocked courts, all flourishing at the same time in the same space--that of Aurora's parents, King Florestan XIV and his Queen; of the beneficent Lilac Fairy; and of the Evil Fairy, Carabosse. What this may tell us about the actual court of Czar Nicholas II, from whose time Sergeyev's notes survive, is no child's story (this new Beauty does not give us the undocumented choreography of 1890, when Alexander III was czar, but rather its condition when Nicholas had been in power for nearly a decade). The vanquishing of Carabosse may have had implications for the ballet's early audiences that have evaporated with time and with the reduction of Petipa's dance forces in most subsequent productions. Those shifting masses not only create much more complex visual patterns than ever before, they also specify the aristocratic nature of the entire milieu, of which the dancing and the drama are elements, threads in a larger ceremonial entity. Of all the mime restorations, the most powerful by far is that of the Shakespearean dumbshow monologue for King Florestan in Act I, as he debates with himself whether to have a group of village women executed for possessing spinning needles, which had been banned from the kingdom under pain of death following Carabosse's prediction that Aurora would grow up to prick her finger on one and die. Should he carry out his harsh edict on this, of all days, Aurora's sixteenth birthday? It is quite a wrenching moment for this fairytale, and the mime Vladimir Ponomarev performed it with the understatement of Gielgud's Hamlet. Eventually, the Queen's gentle pleas convince the King to relent. One could not help thinking of the recent exhibition of books and other documents relating to Nicholas and Alexandra that were on exhibition last year at the New York Public Library: the relationship of the Czar and the Czarina, as expressed in letters between them, is quite close to that between the King and Queen in the ballet--the ruminative Nicholas, who wanted to be an artist and was forced to be a czar, dependent on Alexandra, with whom he appears to have created a domestic life that permitted him escape from the political responsibilities for which he had little appetite. One can see why this mime scene would be excised for several reasons in a Soviet production (and, since it doesn't advance the narrative directly, in a commercially-minded Western one). The amazing thing was to see what it added to the work's great self-reflecting theme of a ballet about the invention, the misfortune, and the renascence of ballet itself. The exultant "Garland Waltz" for a battalion of villagers, including some fifty small children, which follows the mime scene, and the "Rose Adagio" for Aurora and her suitors, which follows the Waltz, acquire a new theatrical depth and necessity, with the Waltz lightening the mood and the Adagio irradiating it, so that when the Act arrives at its dramatic climax--when Aurora does, in fact, prick her finger on a needle and falls senseless--the entire world of the ballet contracts to the network of symbols established by the unavoidable connection between needles and point shoes. In sum, when the ballerina has fallen from the heights of her raised points, the kingdom is sent into shock; and the rest of the ballet will be consigned to reestablishing her authority, and, with the Act III divertissement, to celebrating it. In terms of particular dances in this Sleeping Beauty, the adagios and variations that here represent Petipa have either been preserved in other productions or do not seem individually more wonderful than some of the replacements devised since by Lopukhov, Ashton, and others; but together they comprise an amazing dance architecture, full of visual rhymes and resonances in the way that steps are presented and timed. By the end, when Aurora and the Prince simply walk upstage toward the scenic vision of Apollo the charioteer, one feels something along the lines of a master builder inscribing his initials on a cornerstone. Just as a typical Petipa variation tends to grow mathematically by integers--now one pirouette, now two--the overarching structure of his choreography here accumulates patiently and steadily over an evening. The heart of his style is clarity and exactness. When he complicates elements, he does so in a way that is always comprehensible to the eye and appealing to the mind. That is why every detail matters, and why every decision involved in producing Petipa's work makes a difference. The Aurora who understood this throughout was Asylmouratova, the most senior of the four. Since the last time she performed the role here, in 1989, in the Sergeyev production, her athletic abilities have diminished; but this summer she was unparalleled. Even ten years ago, Aurora was not her ideal showcase, because there are no tragic notes. Still, she conveys the Petipa style fully, giving distinct rhythmic values to the individual movement of her head and hands, timing a double pirouette with the working leg stretched in second position so that she seems to turn like a turret around her own spine, or dancing an allegro combination while maintaining a quiet physical center, thereby supplying a satisfying kinesthetic contrast to the hyperactive coloratura of an accompanying violin. Asylmouratova performed during a Wednesday matinee--that is, shunted to the perimeter of the casting map, like Irma Nioradze, the second-senior Aurora, a last-minute replacement, although, after a shaky start, an interesting one. (Nioradze actually resembles photographs of Carlotta Brianza, Petipa's original Aurora.) The featured Auroras--first-cast Svetlana Zakharova and second-cast Diana Vishneva--come from another generation of ballerinas whose advancement is associated with Vaziev. Vishneva, who can be dazzling in allegro work, is the stronger and more dependable in most technical areas, but she is also a colder stage personality. In the run of Giselle, where, on the first two nights, the casting of these dancers in the title role was reversed, Zakharova created a persuasive tragic heroine, while Vishneva impersonated one. Zakharova can be a goddess as a dancer in some ways: her breathtaking elevation and the plangent rondure of her port de bras were spectacularly beautiful in Balanchine's Serenade. Yet her strengths seem to be linked to weaknesses that, to some extent, are shared by all the principals and the soloists we saw of her generation: gymnastic extensions of the leg seem to be invariably tied to unpredictable balance in multiple pirouettes; fabulous aerial work seems to be linked with mechanically performed or slurred petit allegro technique. The role of Aurora, unhappily for this generation, was made to show perfection in all technical areas. What does one do with ballerinas whose physicality and training incorporate not only a century of science that was unavailable to Petipa, but also changes of emphasis in training that produce deficiencies in some of the very technical particulars on which he put his greatest emphases? There is no doubt that if he were in the studio today, Petipa would be taking advantage of the dancers' freakishly brilliant lines while goading them toward refinements in small jumps and transition steps. Absent Petipa, however, reconstructors of his ballet are in something of a moral jam. When, at the start of the "Rose Adagio," Zakharova flung up one leg past the overhead "six o'clock" position, in a pose where three o'clock was the hour originally posted, it was as if she had torn through a net and said, "Let's get real, this is 1999." To make her the first-cast Aurora is less a statement of the company's collective historical profile than a confession of its current limitations. The only ballerina of this younger
generation who conveyed the impression of being a fully-formed
artist as well as a gifted dancer is Uliana Lopatkina. Her performances
in the Balanchine evening (the Waltz girl in Serenade,
the lead in the second movement of Symphony in C) show
her to have a special affinity for adagio, and although one might
query some of her performing decisions, there was no question
that they were decisions, real choices. In this aspect, the only
comparable male dancer in the Met run was Igor Zelensky, an affecting
Albrecht in Giselle and an explosive surprise in the title
role of Apollo, which he danced during his several years with
the New York City Ballet earlier in this decade and in which,
there, he looked quite ill at ease. With the Kirov, he seemed
to have broken free of some sort of restriction; his account
of the role had the vigor and the enthusiasm of the young Jacques
d'Amboise. |