Humbled and Overwhelmed

The San Francisco Ballet is ending its two week engagement at the NY Koch Theatre with a week-long run of Christopher Wheeldon's Cinderella. Many choreographers, from Frederick Ashton to Alexei Ratmansky have tried their hand at adapting Prokofiev's haunting, expressive score to the ballet stage. The well-known fairy tale also makes this ballet catnip for choreographers and ballet companies. Wheeldon's Cinderella is visually arresting and aesthetically pleasing. The sets and costumes by Julian Crouch are among the production's main attributes. Wheeldon shows himself off as a choreographer with a promising gift for narrative ballet -- his Cinderella never becomes maudlin. The production values are high -- this looks like an old-fashioned fairy tale ballet. There's even imaginative use of puppets. I saw many parents with kids.

Due to some unforeseen circumstances I've had to severely restrict the number of performances I'm able to attend of anything. I decided however to allow myself one performance in the New York City Ballet's fall season, and I chose last night's program of "Short Stories" as that one fall performance. Great pick!

It's the final weekend of the NYCB's Spring Season, and so on Friday night I found myself sloshing through Hurricane Andrea to get to the State Theatre. On Saturday I went to Le Corsaire at the ABT, and in the evening I went across the plaza (again) to the NYCB. Whew. That's a lot of ballet in two days.

Returning to the NYCB after the  circusy Don Quixote of ABT  was like a palette cleanser. Were the performances perfect? No, but I felt at all times that I was watching a remarkable company perform the best choreography in the world. The program ( Allegro Brillante , The Cage , Andantino , and Stravinsky Violin Concerto ) had a little for everyone. I've really run out of plaudits for the NYCB and their ability to put on one high-quality performance after another.

The signature move of the Natalia Osipova/Ivan Vasiliev super-duper Don Quixote  occurs late in the first act -- the move is a one-handed lift, with a ballerina holding a striking pose in the air for effect. But Vasiliev takes it a step further -- in the middle of holding his left, he raises a free leg in arabesque and even raises his foot to demi-pointe. It's a trick that I first saw when I saw their  HD cinemacast with the Bolshoi  more than two years ago. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of showboating in a ballet like Don Quixote . The choreography (a mix of Petipa and Alexander Gorsky) has long been a staple of ballet galas for its bravura requirements. Gorsky's choreography was designed to be a mix of folk dance and classical ballet at its most flamboyant. But (and here's the key): the performers have to look like they are having fun when doing these tricks and playing to the crowd. Last night's performance had this weird mix of every gala tr...

There are times when the ABT can seem like an excellent overall company. It can do some more modern works by Twayla Tharp or Mark Morris very well. The program started off with a spirited rendition of Morris's rather pretentiously named Drink to Me With Thine Eyes Only. I didn't like the ballet, but that doesn't mean I didn't appreciate the dancing. ABT is also often absolutely wonderful in smaller narrative ballets. Ashton's A Month in the Country is a perfect example. It's a 40 minute ballet slice of life ballet about a family: a vain and lonely married woman (Natalia Petrovna), a flirty ward, a rambunctious son, and a clueless and much older husband. There's an "admirer" that the family views as a joke. Then a handsome tutor named Belieav arrives, and feelings rise, tempers flare, and hearts break. The ballet is filled with little Ashton motifs like the sideways "walking" lifts and the fluttering legs. The music (three pieces by C...

I once ran into an ex-boyfriend years after we broke up. It wasn't at all like The Way We Were or any movie where two exes see each other and all the feelings rush back. I barely remembered anything about him, and he had an irritating habit of spitting on the sidewalks. Finally I got so annoyed I got off one stop early on the subway and walked home to avoid spending another minute with him. So much for romance. But that's real life. In ballet, passion is eternal. When two former lovers meet in ballet, the world stops. Hearts collide. And most of all, women bend backwards in a swoon (see above picture) over and over again, to accentuate the point that passion is, indeed, eternal. John Cranko's Onegin is a lush, romantic adaptation of Tchaikovsky's already lush, romantic adaptation of a famous Russian poem. It needs lush, romantic dancers to maximize the drama and romance, and tonight at the ABT, it certainly got the performance of a lifetime in the pair of Diana V...

I once read a biography of Renata Tebaldi entitled Voice of An Angel . The book was filled with beautiful pictures of the legendary soprano, along with a fairly comprehensive outline of her life that for once wasn't simply filled with tomes about how much Tebaldi loved her mother and the adoration "big Renata" engendered in the Metropolitan Opera audiences. Yet after reading the book Renata Tebaldi the person still felt strangely two-dimensional and distant. It was probably the intention of the great lady herself -- she was always a private person.  But read  Mrs. John Claggart's Sad Life , the blog by Albert Innaurato, and suddenly the great soprano becomes not just "Tebaldi" but Renata , a flesh and blood woman full of warmth, humor, and wit. "Mrs. John Claggart" is the Henry James of the opera world -- sharp, dense, insightful, sometimes verbose, but always profound, and able to hint at the darkness beneath the surface. He's seen everythi...

Baz Lurhmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby opened this weekend to mostly negative reviews from the critics. The criticisms were familiar: it was gaudy, it was tacky, it celebrated the very excesses F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novella chastised. The romance between Gatsby and Daisy was sentimentalized, the prose of the novel was awkwardly worked into the script. And so on and so forth. Of all the criticisms I've read, I think only one really holds water: Luhrmann does sentimentalize the romance between Daisy and Gatsby in a way Fitzgerald never did. The Daisy of this movie (played with a porcelain delicacy by Carey Mulligan) is not the "careless people" Daisy of the novel. It's telling that one of the most famous lines about Daisy ("her voice is full of money") was dropped. Luhrmann certainly turned the Gatsby/Daisy connection into something more beautiful than Fitzgerald intended. But otherwise, I thought this was an entertaining, fait...

I attended my first performance of the NYCB's spring season yesterday afternoon. The theme for the spring season is "American Music Festival" and yesterday's program was a rather eclectic collection of Balanchine ballets that were set to American music: Who Cares?, Ivesiana, Tarantella, and Stars and Stripes . Of the four ballets, the one I was most curious about seeing was Ivesiana . It's not a regular in the City Ballet repertoire. It's a rather weird ballet, with three extremely dark, even sinister sections and one section ("In the Inn") that seems more Broadway than anything. As a result the ballet lacks the usual Balanchine cohesion and in fact does seem like a hodgepodge of vignettes set to Charles Ives music, as the title would suggest.

Our family dog Cricket passed away on April 10. She was two days shy of her 15th birthday. She went  suddenly and painlessly, just lay down and never woke up. Sweet and obedient to the last, minutes before she died she had gone outside to go to the bathroom. We first saw Cricket in an animal shelter when she was a puppy. She was in a litter of 6, but she ran to the bars of the cage and started wagging her tail frantically. Our family decided that she was the one. At the time she was still too young to be adopted, so we called the shelter almost every day to see when she'd be ready. We talked about almost nothing else. I still remember the day I came home and my dad said "Look inside" and there was Cricket, in a cardboard box. She ran up to me and started licking me and it was love at first sight. Cricket had no special talents -- she never was good at learning the tricks beyond a few basic ones like "shake hands," and "roll over." But one tric...

Last week I saw  Tiler Peck's Aurora  and thought nothing could positively top that wonderful Sleeping Beauty performance. Then last night I went back and saw Ashley Bouder's Aurora, and I realized that right now, the New York City Ballet probably has two of the greatest Auroras in the ballet world. I cannot choose between them -- they are both so wonderful. Brava to both of them! Ashley Bouder has been dancing Aurora for a longer time, but she and Tiler Peck actually have a lot in common in that the challenges of this role hold no terrors for them. The confidence they exude from the minute they enter the stage never leaves, not for a split second. They are princesses, but both exude an unpretentious aura, as if they were the girls-next-door-who-happen-to-be-the-greatest-dancers-in-the-world.

Parsifal Metropolitan Opera February 18, 2013

Every so often you see a ballet performance so exquisite, such a complete triumph, that you feel lucky just to have been in the audience. This happened today when I saw Tiler Peck's Aurora in the New York City Ballet's two week run of Sleeping Beauty . What an amazing performance from an amazing ballerina. The role of Aurora calls for a delicate balance between the coltish youthfulness of the first act and the regal serenity of the wedding scene. The dance steps still challenge even the most secure ballerinas. But from the moment Tiler Peck bounded onstage in a series of pas de chats and coupe jetes, we knew that this Aurora had no fear. And her smile -- dazzling, but without a hint of archness or self-consciousness -- instantly made this Aurora lovable.

Symphonic Balanchine NYCBallet February 9, 2013

The two-week non-stop Tchaikovsky Festival at the NYCB came to a close today with a rather eclectic program of Le Baiser de la Fee (Stravinsky's orchestrations of some of Tchaikovsky's melodies, including "None But the Lonely Heart,"), Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux , Peter Martins' Bal de Couture , and Diamonds . The afternoon ended on a disturbing note as the scherzo section of Diamonds was omitted and Sara Mearns tweeted immediately after the performance that she had injured herself and apologized. Get well Sara!

La Rondine January 26, 2013 Metropolitan Opera

January 22 is Mr. B's birthday, and what better way to celebrate Mr. B's birthday than another triple bill of Balanchine/Tchaikovsky works. Last night plenty of NYC balletomanes braved the sub-zero temperatures to see this wonderful performance.

Ah, so wonderful to see the NYCB's Winter Season again! I always itch for the Winter Season to start after months of nothing but the Nutcracker. It started on Tuesday but tonight was my first chance to go and all I can say is ... Welcome back Sara! Mearns has been sidelined with an injury for about 8 months, and to see her back in business was such a joy. Actually the whole program was a joy -- three Balanchine/Tchaikovsky masterpieces, all strongly cast. Bravo to the NYCB!

Maria Stuarda January 12, 2013 Metropolitan Opera

Ugh, December was not a good month. Had to cancel several plans. But I'm back in business and yesterday I went to the OONY's Andrea Chenier. My review can be found  here  at parterrebox.