Robbins Shows His Roots

Jerome Robbins was the son of Russian immigrants, and on Friday night, New York City Ballet grouped several of his works to Russian music in a program entitled "Russian Roots." Robbins's old-country roots certainly were deep, and he was interested throughout his career in plumbing them, returning with increasing frequency to folk themes and folk dance vocabulary over the course of his career. But the works collected here do not show his roots' most fruitful aesthetic abundance.

The best thing about the program was the opening duet, "Andantino," which Robbins created for NYCB's Tchaikovsky Festival in 1981. It's performed to the second movement of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, and lets the music's shifts in tempo motivate some rewarding partnering explorations. It's short and modest. Megan Fairchild and Joaquin De Luz did justice to the duet on Friday night: Ms. Fairchild looked long-limbed and Mr. De Luz did not look strained, as he had the night before dancing Mikhail Baryshnikov's original role in "The Four Seasons."

Another Baryshnikov creation, "Opus 19/The Dreamer," was next danced by Gonzalo Garcia, making his debut in this 1979 ballet. Three years earlier, Robbins had created "Other Dances" for Mr. Baryshnikov, and "Opus 19" begins where the earlier ballet had left off in satisfying his ideas as well as his public's about where and how his Russian heritage should take him in the West. It's all about the music, but inevitably the Prokofiev violin concerto to which it is choreographed — music redolent of Prokofiev's ballet or film scores — imposes a febrile scenario of dreaming and waking. The choreography let Mr. Baryshnikov encore some of the pyrotechnics he had mastered so well years earlier, as well as gently nudging him in the neoclassical trajectory he was then trying to master. In the final analysis, however, "Opus 19" has always seemed like much ado about not all that much.

Mr. Garcia joined NYCB last year after a decade with the San Francisco Ballet. He was one of SFB's leading dancers but has yet to put his evident technical abilities together so that they register convincingly within the NYCB context. Too often, his movement has seemed heavy and rhythmically stolid, as it sometimes did Friday. But on the whole it was a studious and well-danced account. The woman's role is less important, but Wendy Whelan's performance contained myriad subtleties. Much of the ballet is shouldered by a small ensemble, which was filled with good dancers on Friday night but was not as taut or interesting as it has sometimes been in the past.

Robbins's "Piano Pieces" was also created for the 1981 Tchaikovsky Festival and it has a flavor of expediency about it. To a sheaf of Tchaikovsky piano works, Robbins doesn't add anything that he hasn't offered more memorably on other occasions.

On Friday night, Sara Mearns and Jared Angle were the couple whose absorption in each other is at its peak, while the darting, clipped steps of Abi Stafford and Amar Ramasar described two young people's excitement at discovering each other and themselves.

Kaitlyn Gilliland and Stephen Hanna were the third pair, moodily decompressing from remembered ardor. Framing the couples is a lot of folk-inflected capering by a large corps and tying it all together are the pyrotechnics of a jester, who was danced by Antonio Carmena. Everyone performed appropriately at Friday night's "Piano Pieces."

Shortly before he died in 1998, Robbins revived at NYCB his "Les Noces," which he had created in 1965 for American Ballet Theatre, his balletic incubus.

The company performed it to taped music in 1998, but Friday night we had the luxury of seeing Stravinsky's cantata performed as intended, which means that four pianos, percussion, vocal soloists and a large chorus were arrayed onstage. That alone makes for an extraordinary aural and visual feast. The music is an relentless rhythmic hammering, and a fragmented sound collage of words and vocals pertaining to the customs of Russian peasant weddings.

As he did in "Le Sacre du Printemps," Stravinsky's work here is driven by the inexorable and impersonal demands of community and nature's renewal. "Sacre" was first choreographed by Nijinsky in 1913, and "Les Noces" was originally choreographed by Nijinsky's sister Bronislava in 1923. Her "Les Noces" is both more balletic and more primally distilled than Robbins's. Her work could exist only on the ballet stage, whereas, watching Robbins's "Les Noces," we are aware that he had just directed and choreographed Broadway's "Fiddler on the Roof." NYCB's performance was a case of well-trained dancers making a great and conscientious exertion that fell short of complete conviction. This ballet deserves to settle into NYCB's repertory more permanently.