New York City Ballet Opens Its Season

Tuesday night was the opening of New York City Ballet's spring season, which was also the opening of its season-long Jerome Robbins Celebration during the year that would have marked his 90th birthday. On view were two long, episodic later works of Robbins: "The Four Seasons" and "West Side Story Suite," which respectively encompass his two major career tracks: ballet and Broadway.

Yes, I did say just a few months ago that 1979's "The Four Seasons" is one of Robbins's best ballets. Tuesday night, however, what made it seem most interesting was the way it functioned as a retrospective summing-up of a tradition, the lavish ballets that were obligatory in Paris opera during the 19th century.

Like all of Robbins's works, good or bad, "The Four Seasons" exerts an independent fascination as a chronicle of Robbins's complex and conflicted psyche ticking away. Robbins puts the steps together with ease and invention but much of the vocabulary and syntax are so deeply and reverentially steeped in the Balanchine neoclassical idiom that it can seem almost a form of camouflage. But when we reach the concluding evocation of "Autumn," Robbins switches gears to a pastiche of Soviet ballet. Here, too, Robbins takes a route through Balanchine territory, since the older master began choreographing well before leaving Russia in 1924, seven years after the revolution. Balanchine's early works helped to establish the Soviet aesthetic, even though so much of his work in the West contradicted what eventually coalesced into dogma in the Soviet Union. Balanchine continued to keep the flamboyant athleticism of Soviet style and technique in his peripheral vision, however, and so, apparently, did Robbins.

Daniel Ulbricht's satyr, as well as Benjamin Millepied and Ashley Bouder's Dionysus and Amphityonis conveyed a good part of the intended ripeness, despite Mr. Millepied's difficulty with some of the gladiatorial stunts in his choreography.

Earlier in the ballet, Tyler Angle made his debut leading "Summer," in which he and Rachel Rutherford were nicely dolorous. Sara Mearns and Philip Neal were nimble in "Spring," which contains the most fertile outpouring of steps in the ballet.

Megan Fairchild, Antonio Carmena, and Adam Hendrickson shivered in "Winter," yet retained the right heat of dance energy.

Robbins's 1995 "West Side Story Suite" exists in the space between "hybrid" and "neither fish nor fowl." The choreography is very much the same as what he did on Broadway for the original musical, and so what we have is ballet dancers impersonating Broadway dancers impersonating urban toughs. Further uprooting "West Side Story Suite" from the Broadway stage and uncomfortably transplanting it to the balletic realm is the fact that some of the NYCB dancers sing, despite their voices being for the most part not terribly distinguished. They also recite snatches of dialogue, which lack credibility due to the dancers' far from slangy speaking voices.

NYCB's dancers, however, performed "West Side Story Suite" courageously, and they even managed to seem a little more authentic than they had last season. Musically, though, the performance suffered from overly polite treatment that Fayçal Karoui gave to Bernstein's score; Mr. Karoui delivered an almost pinkie-in-the-air reading of "America." But it was kind of mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who is in town to sing Mozart at the Met, to stand in a shadowy spot on the stage's apron to sing "Somewhere." She was almost as idiomatic as Renata Tebaldi singing "If I Loved You," but as with Tebaldi, one cherishes the unlikely crossover all the more because of its very oddness. "West Side Story Suite" is a work of such stylistic indeterminacy that Ms. Graham's contribution seemed like one more appropriately ambiguous element.

There was surprisingly little biography, testament, or expatiation on this evening.

The program opened with Robbins's "Circus Polka," a movement fanfare that he created for NYCB's Stravinsky Festival in 1972. Robert La Fosse was the ringmaster, summoning from the wings relay after relay of progressively younger female ballet students who eventually posed to spell out the initials "J.R."

After "Circus Polka" came a slide show montage covering Robbins's career. Before "West Side Story Suite," we also saw some footage of Robbins rehearsing the original cast of the ballet in 1995. Even then, when in his late 70s, only three years before his death, he remained amazingly spry.