An Auspicious Kickoff

American Ballet Theatre conceived and delivered its season-opening gala on Monday in surprisingly elegant taste. The evening included both the obligatory blockbuster items as well as some slightly offbeat programming. The caliber of dance talent was high – that’s no surprise at ABT – and the dancers showed a more discriminating overall level of performance sensibility than is often the case at the company. The only disappointment was the omission of a party piece that was to have featured Ruth Ann Swenson singing alongside ABT dancers; a program note explained that she was ill.Opening the gala with the harvest dance from Act II of “Giselle” seemed a rather odd choice given the season, but ceding the stage to the ensemble was honorable. Everybody tried very hard, particularly the demi-soloists dancing Giselle’s friends.Next came Jerome Robbins’s “Other Dances,” performed by Julie Kent and Angel Corella. Both Ms. Kent and Mr. Corella can be self-absorbed performers, but here they collaborated with each other and pianist David La March to reach a fresh and exciting synergy. Mr. Corella restrained his puppyish eagerness when it wasn’t appropriate, and he resisted the urge to overdo the comic shtick that Robbins incorporated into the choreography. Some of his jumps were exemplary.Ms. Kent’s mannerisms can seem hollow at times, but here her performance registered as splendidly ornamented. She tapped into a reverberant lineage that stretched back to Natalia Makarova, who created “Other Dances” in 1976, and to the “Impressionist” Soviet pas de deux on which “Other Dances” is partly based. Ms. Kent also suggested the neo-Attic flamboyance of Isadora Duncan. Her extensions were high and silky. Her soft, flowing arabesques and the Romantic rubato of her slightly delayed arms were exactly right for the ballet and its Chopin accompaniment.Each of the leads in “Other Dances” is given two solos: one mellow, one effervescent. ABT was undoubtedly aware that the lower-key solos would try a gala audience’s patience, but Ms. Kent and Mr. Corella commendably performed the entire thing, forcing the audience members into a healthy exercise of their attention spans.“Le Corsaire Suite,” a grab-bag of treats from the ballet, saw Gillian Murphy as Medora at her most distinguished in the Adagio of the famous pas de trois. Ms. Murphy then performed a fetching solo, but made the mistake of inserting triple fouette turns in the coda; her bumptiousness turned bumpy here. (Triple fouettes should be stricken from the repertory, since it doesn’t seem that any human can accomplish them smoothly.)Xiomara Reyes was more delicate than usual in Gulnare’s solo from the Act III “Jardin Anime,” but she turned provincial in her exclamatory finishing poses. Recently returned from an injury, Marcelo Gomes as Conrad seemed a little tired though he had his moments. Jose Manuel Carreno’s Ali was sultry, and Herman Cornejo’s whiplash “549” rivoltades in the role of the villain Birbanto were irresistible.In his introductory remarks, ABT’s artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, announced that the gala would offer a “sneak preview” of the season’s repertory to come. But when it comes to Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon,” which returns to the ABT’s repertory this season, a better term might be “advance warning.”This ballet is surfeited with kitsch. ABT showed some imagination by including an excerpt from the Act II gambling scene instead of one of the ballet’s many bedroom adagios. Diana Vishneva offered a properly provocative Manon – both slattern and great lady – but she was even more interesting in the ensemble number in which “Manon” is passed from the arms of man after man. It is meant to summarize all the transactional notches on her gun she’s acquired on her climb to the top of the demi-monde. This could be called a “pas de multitudes.”The constantly shifting planes of Ms. Vishneva’s body seemed to summarize an entire novel’s worth of conflated episodes in this baggage’s progress. She dominated the crowded stage while inspiring her colleagues. The ostensible reprobates supporting her were surprisingly believable, and Mr. Carreno, who is often a rather bland actor, was properly peripheral yet vivid while stalking about as Manon’s rejected lover Des Grieux.Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky then performed the Black Swan pas de deux from “Swan Lake,” minus the solos. On her best behavior, Ms. Dvorovenko moved with a dimensional fullness effectively punctuated with sulphuric volatility. In the coda, she cannily stuck to single fouettes, performed with diamond hard brilliance. Mr. Beloserkovsky’s coda solo could have done with a little less jabbing.Paloma Herrera and Carlos Acosta next performed a segment of George Balanchine’s “Apollo.” Having danced Terpsichore with ABT last fall, Ms. Herrera declaimed her solo with a blend of artistic humility coupled to near-Delphic expressive authority. The peripatetic Mr. Acosta looked like he hadn’t had much rehearsal time, and, perhaps by way of compensation, everything he did, particularly in his solo, was too heavy-handed. He is too strong and proficient a partner to allow any obvious glitches to seep in – one lift was actually extraordinary – but he and Ms. Herrera weren’t quite in sync in the Adagio.Julio Bocca, who will retire this season after 20 years dancing with ABT, performed Jose Limon’s solo “Chaconne.” Mr. Bocca did not have the stamina to accomplish everything that is in the piece, but he expended Herculean effort and lent eloquent amplitude to the solo’s repeated rises and falls, performed to the violin circumlocutions of a Bach Partita.The evening closed with excerpts from the final scene of Frederick Ashton’s “Sylvia,” the 1952 ballet that was a hit in its ABT premiere last year. This scene is a wonderful finale to the full three-act ballet, but the cast became a little giddy trying to launch cold into something this high-spirited.Michele Wiles and David Hallberg led the festivities. Their Adagio was marred by strained moments in the partnering, and their apparent discomfort just slightly dampened a jubilant conclusion to the evening. Overall, however, ABT’s gala was an auspicious kickoff to its spring season.American Ballet Theatre’s Metropolitan Opera season runs until July 15 (Lincoln Center, 212-362-6000).

An Auspicious Kickoff

An Auspicious Kickoff

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