Oppositions
The Kirov's Balanchine at City Center
By JEFFREY GANTZ
NEW YORK — The end of a three-week, thousands-of-miles-from-home season is never the right time to assess a dance company, and that’s multiply true of the Kirov Ballet’s engagement at New York City Center, which ended this past Sunday. The usuals — injuries; tired, jaded dancers; audience-demoralizing last-minute substitutions — were just the beginning. Having found no room at the Metropolitan Opera House, where it had performed La Bayadère, Don Quixote, Swan Lake, and George Balanchine’s Jewels at the 2002 summer Lincoln Center Festival, the company had to settle for the theater that Balanchine and New York City Ballet abandoned in 1964 for the new and more capacious New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. (One apparent casualty of the smaller space was the “Kingdom of the Shades” entrance from the third act of La Bayadère, which was performed without the zigzag ramp.) Back home in St. Petersburg, meanwhile — well, that was the problem: the Kirov’s director, Makhar Vaziev, was back home, having failed to make the trip, amid rumors that he’s about to retire. Vaziev and Valery Gergiev, the general director of the Mariinsky Theatre (where the Kirov is based), do not see eye to eye these days; Gergiev — who, depending on who you talk to, does or doesn’t know jack about ballet — has criticized Vaziev in everything from choreography to casting and training. At home, the company is again known as the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg (both the theater and the troupe were named for Maria Aleksandrovna, wife of Tsar Aleksandr II), but it still tours under the familiar — to Westerners — name of the Leningrad Communist Party leader, Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated in 1934. Peter the Great had no brand-name guarantees when he built St. Petersburg in a swamp; perhaps this company should imitate him and go forward under the appellation it prefers.
The last time the Kirov appeared in Boston, in November 2006, it was to perform Swan Lake, at the Wang Theatre. There were no evening-length ballets at the City Center, only programs of Petipa (excerpts from Paquita, Raymonda, and La Bayadère) and Fokine (Chopiniana, Le spectre de la rose, The Dying Swan, Sheherazade) and William Forsythe (Steptext, Approximate Sonata, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated), with the odd Vaganova (the Diana and Acteon pas de deux) and Harald Lander (Études) thrown in. Reviewing the opening Petipa program, Alastair Macaulay in the New York Times fired the first critical shot: “The Kirov is one of those ballet companies that too often present show-off steps as if the art lay nakedly in nothing but excellence of technical execution.” Freelancing for the Village Voice (the Paper That Used To Have a Dance Critic), Deborah Jowitt seemed to have had a better time: “The women sparkle like perfectly cut diamonds. You may occasionally fault their phrasing or their lack of emotional nuance, but never their technique.” Everybody noticed principal Uliana Lopatkina’s chin pointed defiantly at the upper balcony.
This past weekend, the Kirov’s New York season culminated in a Balanchine program: Serenade, Rubies, and Ballet Imperial. The company’s 2002 New York Jewels was an eye opener. Marcia Siegel in this paper observed that “in stepping into this choreography of Balanchine’s, the Kirov’s members seemed to be learning a different way to dance.” Laura Jacobs in the New Criterion wrote, “To see the company in this looming Balanchine after nine days of story ballets was to see them with nothing on but their dancing. And what a sight.” Even Macaulay in this past Tuesday’s Times described as a triumph the company’s “galvanized, glowing 2000–2002 accounts of Balanchine’s Rubies, and to a lesser extent, the rest of Jewels.”
What I saw in that 2002 Jewels was a company that stretched and softened what had become the New York City Ballet hard line without sacrificing sex or, for the most part, speed. This Balanchine might have lacked the élan of the Paris Opera Ballet’s, but it harbored greater innocence. That impression was confirmed by the first three movements of Serenade Saturday night. Titian-haired Ekaterina Kondaurova and Danila Korsuntsev made for a large, gracious Waltz Girl and Boy, she with her authoritative upper body and he with his easy tours jetés. The dancing had volume and extension and effortless lifts and pillowy phrasing; flipping turns were light-hearted rather than show-offy, and Ekaterina Osmolkina’s Russian Girl was a jubilant presence. There was even a puckeringly astringent traversal of Tchaikovsky’s cloying second-movement Waltz from Mikhail Agrest and the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre; it elicited bittersweet waltzing from Kondaurova and Korsuntsev. And the religioso feel in the women’s-mysteries opening of the Tema Russo third movement led to gamboling that could have been inspired by the fairy footing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
But it all vanished faster than Nick Bottom’s dream. The women did not let their hair down for the Elegy, and notwithstanding Arlene Croce’s dismay at this 1977 development in Serenade’s history, it signals that the Waltz Girl — who’s just been deserted — is moving into a different realm. The Dark Angel and the Elegy Man — Daria Vasnetsova and Alexander Sergeev — strode on with little gravitas, and between them they could hardly manage her 720-degree turn on pointe: it wobbled fearfully. In Boston Ballet’s Serenade, the Russian Girl flashes a warning look at the audience before rushing on to join the other three, her hair flying behind her; Melanie Atkins could compress the entire ballet into that one look. Osmolkina hardly bothered. The Apollo-like conjoining of the Elegy Man with the three women never cast its spell, Sergeev being too light to anchor it and Kondaurova losing her thread. As she was borne off (into the light?), she didn’t even do the signature backbend, only tilted back her head.
Sunday afternoon’s performance was better and not. Victoria Tereshkina affected an unusually somber Waltz Girl, frozen in contemplation at the end of the Sonatina, meeting her fate with head bowed at the end — and bending deeply as she went off. Kondaurova, now the Dark Angel, weighted the Elegy and was steady in her big turn. Back as the Elegy Man, Alexander Sergeev was marginally better, but Nadezhda Gonchar’s Russian Girl had little nuance and strayed ahead of the beat, and Yevgeny Ivanchenko labored where Korsuntsev flew.
One might wonder how the pieces in this program were selected and ordered. Serenade (1935) and Ballet Imperial (1941) are early Balanchine works set to Tchaikovsky; Rubies is later (1967) and set to Stravinsky. All three offer a lead couple plus a second woman who’s outside their orbit. And in all three, there aren’t enough men to go around. The four men who come on in the Elegy of Serenade have to partner eight women, and at the end the men bear the Waltz Girl out while the women they might be dancing with look on. The Rubies curtain rises on a daisy chain of four men and nine women, and that’s as good as it gets for the women; later on it’s “Boys’ Night Out” — just the boys. Ballet Imperial opens with a line of eight men advancing to release their partners from fourth position, but eventually the women’s ranks swell to 16, and in the second movement the male lead swings a line of 10 women, five on each side, as if they were the Swan Lake princesses that Siegfried will never marry.
Rubies is the “American” section of Jewels (Emeralds being “French” and Diamonds “Russian”), with its spiky, spoofy 1929 Stravinsky score, the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra — and never mind that the composer wrote and premiered it in Paris. The music’s three movements — Presto, Andante rapsodico (with an enigmatic brass chorale near the end that anticipates the second movement of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra), Allegro capriccioso ma tempo giusto — are nothing if not capricious. The choreography is period Picasso Cubist, with a nod to the Paris Jockey Club: the ladies have to shake and shimmy and smile without looking as if they were trying to hustle customers. And no lagging behind the beat.
The Kirov girls of 2008 are challenged by Stravinsky’s jagged rhythms in a way that I don’t remember of the class of 2002: they don’t displace their pelvises with enough bite (theirs is the art of classy stripping), and in the pony sections they don’t pump their knees high enough. (The orchestra and pianist Lyudmila Sveshnikova also seemed soft-edged.) But coming on for Alina Somova as the couple girl Saturday night, Olesia Novikova was pert and teasing and rippled through her big leg swings; she’d kick a leg up to her tiara without making a big deal of it and then, after a swirl of chaîné turns, exit with a wink. Leonid Sarafanov was a cocky, virtuoso partner in the Andante duet but not an idiomatic one, and as the big girl Nadezhda Gonchar looked uncomfortable from the outset: as the orchestra reprised its opening thunder and lightning, she let the four men manhandle her in the “Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors” section, and she had difficulty with the three nasty flat-footed penché arabesques that follow.
Sunday afternoon, Novikova was back with a comic foil of a partner in Vladimir Shklyarov, who, bucking like a cowboy out of Rodeo, nearly fell during his duet shenanigans before letting the audience know he meant it. The “Boys’ Night Out” chase in the third movement can be a Jets-and-Sharks parody; here it was more like the Keystone Cops. It might not be what Balanchine — or the Balanchine Trust — had in mind, but at least it was something. Kondaurova turned up as a sly, slinky big girl, out of her element in the jockey prancing but later controlling her four men as if she were Marilyn Monroe surrounded by paparazzi, eluding them with ease and then clearing the stage with the serenity of her penché arabesques. Novikova and Shklyarov were so conspiratorially playful, their duet didn’t hold much tension. The ballet didn’t finish on the beat here, and it doesn't on the Paris Opera Ballet Jewels DVD, instead ending with a post-musical exclamation point.
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