American Ballet Theater Opens New Season on a Strong Note

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 27 May 2014 22:01

Written by Jack Angstreich

The new American Ballet Theater season at Lincoln Center began, after an opening night gala performance, with a run of Don Quixote, choreographed by Marius Petipa and Alexander Gorsky, here presented in the 1995 production staged by Kevin McKenzie and Susan Jones. The modern Don Quixote is said by some to be a Soviet bastardization of the classical original and is often derided by cognoscenti; indeed, it does come across as pure fluff, albeit of a highly entertaining kind. The slender and improbable comic narrative is a mere armature upon which the effervescent dances have been embroidered for purposes of maximum display. The Ludwig Minkus score, a tuneful pastiche of Spanish-inflected melodies, has been undervalued — while not on a par with the great Romantic ballet music by Edouard Lalo, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Alexandr Glazunov, and others, it nonetheless possesses great charm. The scenery and costumes by the talented and ubiquitous Santo Loquasto here are serviceable, if generic.

The final performance, on the evening of Monday, May 19th, featured the fine Cuban ballerina Xiomara Reyes, who was unusually dazzling in the lead role of Kitri, if not quite the match of the scintillating Natalya Osipova or Veronika Part. ( Natalya Osipova did not perform in Don Quixote, this season but Part played the part in the previous week.  Xiomara Reyes, although on the whole outshone here, is incidentally a superb and touching Giselle.) In terms of sheer athleticism, the beefcake star, Ivan Vasiliev, is without peer and, for that reason alone, is always an exciting and popular Basilio even if he does not offer the elegant precision of an Alban Lendorf, who performed the role here in the previous week, also partnering Xiomara Reyes. The leads are assisted by an outstanding supporting cast: Misty Copeland as Mercedes and as the Queen of the Dryads, Jared Matthews as Espada, Devon Teuscher and Melanie Hamrick as the Flower Girls, Isadora Loyola and Zhiyao Zhang as the Gypsy Couple, and Yuriko Kajiya as Amour — all splendid! A further grace note of this performance was the corps de ballet which was, gratifyingly, in nearly top form while Ivan Vasiliev and Xiomara Reyes received a deservedly rapturous ovation for their astonishing pyrotechnics in the last act.

As an interlude amongst the full-length story ballets that constitute the main fare at American Ballet Theater, the “Classic Spectacular” program exhibits some other jewels in the company’s repertoire. With the opening work in the program, George Balanchine’s masterpiece, Theme and Variations, an exquisite, abstract exercise in apparent nostalgia for Imperial Russia, originally created for ABT in 1947 and set to music from Tchaikovsky’s orchestral Suite No. 4, we move from what may be mere entertainment to aesthetic enchantment. At the matinee performance, the thrilling leads were the pretty Sarah Lane along with Daniil Simkin, one of the strongest male dancers in the company; the evening performance of the same day featured Isabella Boylston and and New York City Ballet principal, Andrew Veyette, who, although very good, didn’t quite attain Danil Simkin's perfection. The costumes by Zack Brown are marvelous.

George Balanchine’s Duo Concertant, set to music by Igor Stravinksy, is a high-point of the choreographer’s more intimate, modernist works and is a staple at City Ballet where it has notably been recently performed by Robert Fairchild and Tiler Peck amongst others. Paloma Herrera and James Whiteside were solid at the matinee performance but both were surpassed in the evening program by Eric Tamm and, above all, Misty Copeland, who was the most impressive of all the principals.

Leonide Massine’s rarely seen and unjustly neglected Gaîté Parisienne, set to music by Jacques Offenbach, provided a fabulous conclusion to these performances. Veronika Part and Jared Matthews afforded much pleasure as the leads in the matinee; their counterparts in the evening were the brilliant Hee Seo partnered by Marcelo Gomes. The costumes by Christian Lacroix are appropriately vividly colorful, if not beautiful. 

American Ballet Theater

Metropolitan Opera House

Lincoln Center

212 362 6000

May 12 - July 5, 2014

www.abt.org

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