“Choreographers of the 20th and 21st Centuries” at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 28 October 2024 13:20

Written by Jack Angstreich

Devon Teuscher in In the Upper Room. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor.

At Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, on the evening of Sunday, October 20th, I had the considerable pleasure to attend a superb mixed program—entitled “Choreographers of the 20th and 21st Centuries”—presented by the extraordinary American Ballet Theater.

The event opened magnificently with its strongest work: George Balanchine’s glorious Ballet Imperial from 1941, staged here by Colleen Neary, with exceptional stage and costume design by Jean-Marc Puissant and effective lighting by Mark Taylor. The piece is set to Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s second Piano Concerto—here admirably performed by soloist Emily Wong and wonderfully conducted by David LaMarche—a distinguished Romantic opus that is seldom played and is overshadowed by its enormously popular predecessor—I have some ambivalence about the selection of such a concerto as the basis for choreography but Balanchine nonetheless achieves a characteristically brilliant spectacle even if this may rank just below his very finest accomplishments. The production featured a marvelous slate of dancers—amongst the primary cast, Christine Shevchenko above all and Chloe Misseldine were stellar, ably abetted by Calvin Royal III. The remarkable secondary cast included Sunmi Park, Fangqi Li, Sung Woo Han and Jose Sebastian, with enchanting support from the fabulous corps de ballet.

Also compelling was Neo from 2021 by Alexei Ratmansky—probably the greatest contemporary choreographer that employs a classical vocabulary—which is set to music by Dai Fujikura—here performed by Sumie Kaneko—with costumes by Moritz Junge and lighting by Brad Fields. A brief duet, the piece does not have the grand ambition of Ratmansky’s greatest works, such as his glorious Namouna, but it was dynamically danced by an exquisite Isabella Boylston, confidently partnered by Jarod Curley, here replacing James Whiteside.

The evening concluded arrestingly with Twyla Tharp’s mesmerizing In the Upper Room from 1986–here staged by Shelley Washington with Blane Hoven—set to a incandescent original score by Philip Glass, with costumes by Norma Kamala and lighting Jennifer Tipton. The work is a worthy counterpart to Jerome Robbins’s astonishing Glass Pieces, even if it is not quite of the same eminence as that supreme masterwork. An amazing cast was especially noteworthy for the dancing of Devon Teuscher, Gillian Murphy, Hee Seo (here replacing Boylston), Hurlin again, and above all Aran Bell, who was truly superlative.

“Innovation Past and Present” Showcases Great Choreographers with The American Ballet Theater

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 25 October 2024 15:14

Written by Jack Angstreich

Scene from La Boutique. Photo: Kyle Froman.

At Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, on the evening of Thursday, October 17th, I had the exceptional pleasure to attend American Ballet Theater’s marvelous program of three dance works by different choreographers entitled “Innovation Past and Present,” featured as part of its fall season.

The event began splendidly with the enchanting La Boutique, which received its world premiere with these performances and was choreographed by Gemma Bond and set to the wonderful music by Gioachino Rossini orchestrated by Ottorino Respighi for Sergei Diaghilev’s famous 1919 Ballets Russes production, La Boutique Fantasque, by Léonide Massine, to which the new work is very much an hommage. (Ormsby Wilkins—who conducted confidently—and Charles Barker contributed to rearranging the score.) The attractive stage and costume design is by Jean-Marc Puissant, with effective lighting by Clifton Taylor.

The excellent cast was headlined by principals Isabella Boylston—who was superb—and Thomas Forster, along with Chloe Misseldine, Michael De La Nuez, Breanne Granlund and Jake Roxander. Also, notable in secondary parts were Sierra Armstrong, Jose Sebastian, Remy Young and Jacob Clerico, with strong—if maybe slightly underehearsed—support from the stellar corps de ballet, which shone in all the pieces on view.

Another striking world premiere was Kyle Abraham’s compelling Mercurial Son, which also employed a classical vocabulary although to avant-garde, rather than nostalgic, ends. The unconventional score is by Grischa Lichtenberger, with costumes by Karen Young and lighting by Dan Scully. Another superior cast included Skylar Brandt—who was especially remarkable—Léa Fleytoux, Granlund and Roxander again, Kanon Kimura, Melvin Lawovi and Calvin Royal III.

The event closed stunningly with the magnificent realization of a seldom produced, underappreciated masterpiece of 20th-century classical ballet, Harald Lander’s Études from 1948, which is set to delightful music by Carl Czerny brilliantly adapted and orchestrated by Knudåge Riisager. The choreographer has said about it:

Études means so much to me, because this ballet is an expression of myself, and of my thoughts on dance. Dancing is not just delivering some steps to the audience. The purpose of ballet is, increasingly so, to combine spirit, dance, and music!

The amazing ballerina Devon Teuscher shone at the head of a dazzling slate of dancers that also included the indelible Jarod Curley and Andrew Robare.

Ballet Theater’s fall season runs through November 3rd.

New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center Perform "Neharot"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 25 October 2024 14:35

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee

At Lincoln Center’s excellent David Geffen Hall, on the afternoon of Sunday, October 13th, I had the pleasure of attending a memorable concert presented by the New York Philharmonic under the confident direction of the celebrated composer and conductor, Matthias Pintscher. 

The event began strongly with a powerful account of Pintscher’s own challenging, somewhat lugubrious, and impressively orchestrated neharot from 2020, a work which ends abruptly and which received its US premiere with these performances. The composer provided the following statement on the piece:

“neharot” means rivers in Hebrew, but also tears. It also describes the tears of lamentation. This music was written during the worst time of many daily deaths in spring 2020 and is a clear echo of the devastation and fear, but also of the hope for light, that so emotionally characterized this time of our lives. Since the music evokes the river as a sonic phenomenon, it is also inspired by the mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, where several rivers cross exactly under the place where Chartres was built (and rebuilt after it was burned down, totally destroyed by fate and resurrected ... thus a symbol for the emotional content of the music). I wanted to paint long arcs of sound with the music — whereby the two harps are used extensively as the source of the sound spectrum of the dark sound world of neharot. The piece is a tombeau, a requiem, a kaddish — for all the people we have lost in this unprecedented time. 

The eminent soloist Gil Shaham then entered the stage for a sterling performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s brilliant Concerto in E minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 64, from 1844. James M. Keller, in his notes on the program, provided some useful background on it:

In March 1845 [Ferdinand] David played the premiere of Mendelssohn’s enduringly popular E- minor Violin Concerto, which the composer had contemplated writing as early as 1838. “I’d like to do a violin concerto for you for next winter,” he wrote to David on July 30 of that year. “One in E minor is running through my head, and the opening of it will not leave me in peace.” Curiously, ensuing sketches reveal that it was a piano concerto, rather than a violin concerto, that started taking form, one that matched the eventual violin concerto in both key and structure. By the time Mendelssohn focused definitively on the composition in 1844, it had evolved with certainty into a violin concerto. He consulted closely with his soloist as he composed it, mostly about technical issues but in some cases concerning more general matters of structure and balance [ . . . . ] 

The initial movement, marked Allegro molto appassionato, begins Romantically, if not effusively, while the influence of Ludwig van Beethoven is discernible—Shaham played the composer’s own cadenza. The lyrical Andante that ensues—which has most of the loveliest music in the concerto—grows in intensity before reverting to a more meditative ethos. The opening of the finale has an almost pastoral character but the movement quickly acquires an ebullient momentum with march-like rhythms, projecting a triumphant sensibility. Enthusiastic applause elicited a rewarding encore from the soloist: the marvelous Gavotte en rondeau from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006.

The true highlight of the concert, however, was its second half: a forceful reading of Arnold Schoenberg’s striking, seldom played tone-poem, Pelleas and Melisande, Op. 5, a somewhat neo-Wagnerian work that also has affinities with the music of Gustav Mahler, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Richard Strauss. According to Keller, it evidently was Strauss that introduced Schoenberg to the eponymous Maurice Maeterlinck play that is the basis for the piece, “suggesting in 1902 that the emerging composer turn it into an opera.” He adds:

Maeterlinck, a Belgian, had emerged as a leading voice of symbolist aesthetics, and the premiere of his play Pelléas et Mélisande, in Paris in 1893, proved a watershed cultural moment. Claude Debussy quickly secured rights to set it as an opera, which he completed in 1902. Gabriel Fauré wrote incidental music for a production of the play in London in 1898, and Jean Sibelius did the same in 1905, when the play was given in Helsinki. 

In a 1950 article, Schoenberg wrote:

It was around 1900 when Maurice Maeterlinck fascinated composers, stimulating them to create music to his dramatic poems. What attracted all was his art of dramatizing eternal problems of humanity in the form of fairy tales, lending them timelessness without adhering to imitation of ancient styles.

I look forward to the remainder of what appears to be an exciting season for the ensemble.