Bernstein Centenary
Composer: Leonard Bernstein Choreographers: Wayne Mcgregor, Liam Scarlett and Christopher Wheeldon
The Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House, Bow Street, Covent Garden, London WC2 (020-7304 4000). Until 9 April Running time: 2hrs 45mins (including intervals) ★★★
There’s a “kinetic kick and theatrical flair to Leonard Bernstein’s dance scores that have, rightly, made them beloved by choreographers”, said Judith Mackrell in The Guardian. But one of the delicious revelations of the Royal Ballet’s three-part programme marking the great composer’s centenary – two new ballets and one revival – is “just how deep the dance impulse” lies, not only in more familiar stage works such as West Side Story and Fancy Free, but in Bernstein’s concert scores, too.
The American surely never wrote anything more beautiful than his Chichester Psalms, said Debra Craine in The Times. And in the first offering of the evening, Wayne Mcgregor’s new short ballet Yugen (it means “profound grace” in Japanese) “floats seductively on the sheer grace” of Bernstein’s 1965 choral settings of the King David Psalms, in Hebrew. The choreography is “suffused with passion – romantic and religious, secular and biblical” – and is brilliantly executed by the entire cast. The stage design by the artist and author Edmund de Waal – a grand backdrop of tall, hollow boxes that hint at cathedral windows – is “stunning”. The only irritant at the performance I attended of this pleasing if hardly game-changing piece, said Mark Monahan in The Daily Telegraph, was the “audience’s fawning response and the preposterous curtain call”, which lasts half as long again as the dance. “Get a grip, everyone.”
Second up there’s a revival of Liam Scarlett’s “sleek, shallow” The Age of Anxiety, said Louise Levene in the FT. It, too, is “handsomely staged and superlatively danced”. And to conclude, there’s Christopher Wheeldon’s new Corybantic Games – set to Bernstein’s Serenade After Plato’s “Symposium” – in which the 26-strong ensemble “ebb and flow in a series of mildly Grecian frolics”. The tender pas de deux include male/male and female/female pairings, said Zoë Anderson in The Independent. “Nonheterosexual pairings are overdue in ballet and it is good to see them danced with such lyricism.”