Dancing to Mozart – and Making It Sparkle

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“Symphonie Concertante,” presented in full by American Ballet Theatre after a seven-year-long absence from any stage, is probably the most classical of Balanchine’s neoclassical ballets. It is closely contoured to the music, but never slavish. The steps are textbook vocabulary, but glued together with the twists and tugs and fillips of Balanchine’s signature syntax and rhythms. Its articulation must be both signature Balanchine in its crisp staccato, and must make visible the prolonged cantilena of stringed instruments. Though technically rigorous, it is supposed to look as effortless and sparkling as Mozart’s score sounds.

And at ABT, it does. On Friday, Paloma Herrera and Julie Kent played viola and violin, and on Saturday afternoon Veronika Part and Michele Wiles took over these roles. All four ballerinas gave performances imbued with thoroughbred grace, ease, and lightness.

The ballet contains moments in which solo musical instruments and solo ballerinas link up for moments of unanimity, and the choreography calls for both pairs of ballerinas to perform in almost uncanny synchronization. There are also instances in which they echo each other’s phrases, which permit prolonged opportunity to study their personal styles and attributes. For instance, on Saturday afternoon, while Ms. Part and Ms. Wiles performed in tandem, it was fascinating to see both Ms. Wiles’s slight anticipation and Ms. Part’s slight savoring of the sounds she was meant to illustrate.

On Friday night, Ms. Kent’s line was vibrant and expressive to the tips of her extremities, and her jump was unwontedly high and fizzy in the very fast Presto. Ms. Herrera modulated her innate exuberance — while her jump was high and effortless, she seemed to call upon only a portion of her resources, and never appeared to be dancing on her capital.

On Saturday afternoon, Ms. Part and Ms. Wiles really made their arms sing in the second movement cadenza, but a little more leaning into their hips could have helped illuminate the soft-shoe time-step flavor of some of their steps. On Friday night, it was good to see Ms. Herrera and Ms. Kent in the Presto relaxing the artistocratic etiquette they had maintained so impeccably, allowing themselves to cut loose with some of the sashaying and strutting movements that always mark Balanchine works even when the idiom is his most classically “pure.”

With its 22-women ensemble, the ballet is a little cramped on the City Center stage, but watching it here allows us to see it at its most authentic — this is the stage on which it received most of its original performances. But City Center’s size prevents moments like the baseball pitcher wind-up arms of the corps at the close of the first movement from becoming as big and free as they could be. Likewise, a larger, edgier tombé forward by the ballerinas on some steps would showcase more persuasively the quintessential Balanchinian tenet that movement is meant to push ahead at the risk of a little uncertainty.

But seeing “Symphonie Concertante,” at City Center also allows a rewarding emotional intimacy, particularly in the second movement Andante, when a romantic dynamic comes fleetingly to the fore.There are here intimations of rivalry and conflict between the two ballerinas, each competing for the attention of a cavalier, danced by Gennadi Saveliev on Friday and Marcelo Gomes on Saturday. Both Ms. Kent on Friday night and Ms. Part on Saturday afternoon did a little emoting that managed to stay true to Balanchine’s demands that movement speak for itself. Both ballerinas reflected hints of heartbreak or regret in their arms or their arabesques as readily as on their faces, and the lingering eye contact they made with their cavalier kept us aware of an emotional subtext. Indeed, although the orchestra played well, the two instrumental soloists — Ronald Oakland on violin and Ronald Carbone on viola — would not have been amiss plumbing the score’s tragic fervor in this movement a bit more.

The scene onstage was considerably more turbulent during Jorma Elo’s “Glow-Stop,” which received its world premiere last Thursday, and was repeated again Saturday night with a new 12-member cast. The ballet is in two sections: the first to one movement from a Mozart symphony, the second, following a blackout, performed to a foreboding movement from a piano concerto by Philip Glass.

“Glow-Stop” could not have reached the stage without the precedent of Twyla Tharp’s 1984 “Bach Partita,” and William Forsythe’s 1986 “The Vertiginous Trill of Exactitude,” both of which blazed a trail to a new school of frenetic neoclassicism set to Baroque music. Mr. Elo’s movement is even knottier, twitchier and more convoluted than either Mr. Forsythe’s or Ms. Tharp’s, but he does not go to the extremes of length that Ms. Tharp does.

Mr. Elo’s work is a melange of frenetic, joint-wrenching thrashing. The Glass piece is considerably slower than the Mozart, but nevertheless Mr. Elo races ahead with double-time flurries and seizures. The emotional mood is alienation. The dancers prowl the stage restlessly. Mr. Elo is fascinated with crouches and slides: Two men come hopping out of a downstage wing like the visitation of a biblical plague. Sometimes the dancers’s arms strike snarkily at each other. At one point, Ms. Herrera skates away from Jesus Pastor triumphantly, leaving him bereft.

In this aerobicized work, much of the movement is off balance: Mr. Elo keeps blowing headwinds into the dancer’s equilibrium. On a number of occasions, one or two dancers stand still panting while others move. We see, and are meant to see, dancers’ responses to being pushed to the limits of their capacity and endurance. But we in the audience aren’t pushed quite that far.

ABT’s season continues through November 5 (West 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-581-1212).


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