This mixed bill yields mixed blessings
Mixed bill
Royal Ballet, Covent Garden ★★★★★
The Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill ought to have launched with a rip-roaring flourish. Mining a particularly rich period in the Royal Ballet’s history, it intelligently places Frederick Ashton’s masterpiece of gently saturnine comedy Enigma
Variations (1968) between two first-rate but very different abstract works from two years earlier: Kenneth Macmillan’s exquisitely spare, citrus-coloured Concerto and Rudolf Nureyev’s lavish reworking of the final act of Petipa’s 1898 Mariinsky staple, Raymonda.
That Tuesday’s opening night didn’t fly was down largely to casting – or, to be more exact, under-casting. Both Concerto and Raymonda Act III are two opulent showpieces set to lovely music (by Shostakovich and Glazunov), golden opportunities for an A-list ballet company to sparkle, especially in the girls’ ranks.
However, there was no Marianela Nuñez, Natalia Osipova, Yasmine Naghdi or Claire Calvert. Francesca Hayward was given only the plum but fleeting role of Dora Penny in
Enigma. And why, barely a fortnight after dancing the first night of Manon, was Sarah Lamb again given the juiciest girl’s role of the evening, as the lead in Raymonda? She is capable but, with the best will in the world, has neither the line nor the stage-devouring energy for this.
In the second movement of
Concerto (by rights, one of the most transporting passages in all ballet), that infinitely professional principal Lauren Cuthbertson didn’t put a foot wrong, but nor did she excite. There was a boxed-in quality to her performance, with no sense of a narrative swelling beneath the abstraction.
As for the “red” couples in the first movement, legs were often extended and turns executed as if the idea of collective unity was an alien one. Insufficient time in the rehearsal room, or plenty of instruction but with scant attention paid? Impossible to say.
The evening was saved from ignominy by solid work from the corps (and house orchestra) throughout, some excellent individual performances in Concerto and Raymonda, and by an Enigma Variations that, by contrast with the other two works, felt true to its creator’s intentions. In Concerto, Marcellino Sambé very much led from the front in the first movement, with rising star Reece Clarke providing strong, stately partnering for Cuthbertson in the second. Raymonda saw Vadim Muntagirov come across – not for the first time – as the ideal exponent of the grand late19th-century Russian style, a fellow entirely up to the technical challenges and also emphatically at home. Mayara Magri was the satisfyingly musical standout in a collection of otherwise disappointing variations, and Isabella Gasparini – a soloist we’re rightly seeing more and more of – lit up the pas de trois like a ray of Brazilian sunshine: particularly beautiful upperbody presentation from her.
As for the lavishly designed, evergreen throwback-victoriana of Enigma Variations (in which Gasparini would shine), this coalesced well. Hayward proved a predictably delectable Dora and Matthew Ball a super and very funny Troyte, but everyone in this scintillatingly character-driven response to Elgar’s famous music clearly knew their place, the intricacies of the steps, and the importance of vivacious but tasteful theatricality in giving the piece a heartbeat.
The highlight, as it should be, was Nimrod. As Elgar’s famous adagio soared, Christopher Saunders (as Elgar), Laura Morera (as his wife) and Bennet Gartside (as their friend Jaeger) fully embraced the marvellous subtleties of Ashton’s choreography, generating exactly the right impression of mutual affection, shared, bittersweet experience and inner life. Ashton, at least, would have been proud.
There were opportunities for an A-list ballet company to sparkle. However, there was no Nuñez or Osipova