NYCB cooks up delicious all-Balanchine banquet
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » What do you crave in ballet? Fairytales and swooning tragedy? Angular daring and startling modernism? Classical symmetry and knockout technique? The New York City Ballet’s all-George Balanchine feast at SPAC Thursday night served up all three, plus a dash of Neapolitan spice.
Balanchine joked that packing the house is easy if you call every ballet “Swan Lake,” but in 1951 he sprung his own one-act version. Using Tschaikovsky’s lakeside scenes, it focuses on the doomed love of Prince Siegfried and Odette, the swanqueen.
Yet this is no “Swan Lake Lite”; it packs in as much dancing and emotion as the four-act ballet. As Odette, Sara Mearns’ technical dazzle concentrates tragic feeling like a laser. Her precise pirouettes and pointework signal her steely armor against love, while her luxurious melts into backbends and wild plunges forward into penché, securely supported by Jared Angle as
Siegfried, suggest her human desire.
Odette’s 30 swans, all in black, create continually shifting geometric formations, ultimately dividing the yearning lovers. Mearns’ Odette proves you don’t need evil Odile and her 32 fouettés to make a profoundly beautiful “Swan Lake.”
Taylor Stanley, sharp and confident in his first “Stravinsky Violin Concerto,” Balanchine’s 1972 modernist masterpiece, dances the boldly experimental pas de deux with Rebecca Krohn as a contorted ritual of anxiety. Hands joined, their arms bristle with tension, their estrangement peaking when Krohn bends backward to the floor and rotates her body, walking on hands and feet like some fabulous creature.
In the ballet’s second pas, Sterling Hyltin and Chase Finlay’s quite different ritual brims with aching forgiveness. When she leans on him, back to back, he stands upright and swings her around on one arm to face him. Twice he kneels and presses her knees together, worshiping but incapacitating her. She finally nestles against his chest as he extends his arm, showing her the world, then tenderly covers her eyes with his hand and kneels behind her.
These two mysterious, remarkable duets play out between an opening Toccata that unfolds with thrilling logic and a closing Capriccio for all 20 dancers that alternates jazzy playfulness with folksy Russian-flavored motifs. “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” delivers astonishing, multilayered flavors. Arturo Delmoni played violin.
The banquet opened with “Allegro Brillante,” a 1957 Tschaikovsky work for lead couple and a corps of eight, with Susan Walters as pianist. Balanchine called it “everything I know about classical ballet in 13 minutes,” and Tiler Peck makes pure classicism both cleansing and electrifying. Andrew Veyette partners her in turns during which she skies her working leg, as well as in beautiful, radical leans against his body.
But Peck’s solo work sets this confection ablaze: double pirouettes, slow turns that accelerate into rapidfire spins, one set of pirouettes that zooms her away from Veyette, and another that zips her to a leaping exit. Finally Veyette hoists her high overhead, a ballerina in delicious triumph.
In the evening’s amusebouche, Balanchine’s eightminute, high-speed “Tarantella,” to Gottschalk, with Nancy McDill on piano, Joaquin De Luz gave a pepper-hot performance, leaping high in entrechats, decelerating uncannily out of a spin, roaring in a circle of turning leaps, and punishing his tambourine. Erica Pereira’s fouettés earned her a giant smooch when De Luz grabbed her at the end.
NYCB’s All-Balanchine program returns Saturday at 2 p.m.