Nimble Tread

Wisdom is in Learning What to Overlook

Harold Bloom has some things he wants to get off his chest.

Addendum

It's come to my attention that during the course of Ashton's research for Marguerite and Armand, he discovered that the character of Marguerite Gautier -- taken from Dumas fils' novel La Dame aux camélias -- was, in fact, based on a real person, one Marie Duplessis, a courtesan who died of consumption at twenty-three.  Dumas was in love with Mlle. Duplessis, and as coincidence would have it, so was Franz Liszt.  Ashton stumbled upon the connection months after choosing Liszt's B minor Piano Sonata as the ballet's score, and "often wondered whether [Marie Duplessis] could have inspired this very piece."

Quality Control

La Fête étrange is based on a chapter from Alain-Fournier’s novel, Le Grand Meaulnes, and warns of love’s perils, especially as they relate to jealousy and unrequited passions.  While wandering through the woods, a young man named Julien finds himself on the grounds of a château, and it isn’t long before he notices a group of guests warming to the festive spirit of the young châtelaine’s engagement party.  Not surprisingly, Julien takes a shine to the girl, and makes the rookie mistake of interpreting her kindness toward him as a sign of returned affection.  As proof that sometimes a girl just can’t win, her fiancé – a tight-sphinctered nobleman – witnesses her gracious behaviour, and thinking the worst, conjures a storm of indignation from which he strides out of her life, stage left.  Thus Julien and the chatelaine are left to tread in their respective grief, which I imagine must be considerable.

This story came to me, albeit in slightly different form, via John Percival’s programme notes from last night’s mixed bill at Covent Garden.  I’ve long been of the mind that there’s something to be said for arriving early to live performances, and in this case that something was that my time-killing reading allowed me to decipher what was perhaps the most muddled performance I’ve ever seen on a non-high school auditorium stage.  There were, in fact, moments where I thought Percival got his wires crossed, and was describing a completely different ballet.  Take for instance the moment wherein the accused lovers meet.  Julien – danced effeminately and over-eagerly by the very likeable Brian Maloney – bounds through the woods with terrific gusto until he is stopped in his tracks by the châtelaine (Zenaida Yanowsky) and her abundant beauty.  What ensues is hardly the stuff of melodramatic intrigue: Julien stands around with a goofy look on his face while the object of his affection shakes it a little, all from within the safe confines of her bevy of bridesmaids.  There is some touching involved, even a pas de deux, but it comes across as platonic at best, and ridiculous at worst.  Given that Zenaida could probably rest her chin atop Maloney’s head, the sight of the poor man trying to lift her to the heavens made me squirm; I kept thinking that she’d have to bend her knees in order for her feet to leave the ground. 

Enough has been said about the problems Yanowsky’s faced due to her height to warrant my omitting further discussion here and now.  Suffice to say this was a flagrant misuse of an exceptionally talented ballerina: the disparity in a) size, and b) acting ability between Zen and Maloney was far too much for her to overcome, and the consequence was a bucket of ice-water poured over the ballet.  How could the châtelaine’s fiancé (played exceptionally, given the circumstances, by Gary Avis) be convincingly peeved when his bride-to-be seems to have done nothing more than take a turn around the room with her little cousin?  To make matters worse, the lovers’ confrontation is put on hold in order to accommodate a quartet of dancing bridesmaids.  Thus, upon discovering his fiancée in the arms of another man, the noble bridegroom can do nothing but seethe and twiddle his thumbs for a couple of minutes until these four girls – who were probably the châtelaine’s roommates at Radcliffe, and I would guess are all named Katie – finish their expositional soft-shoe.  I’d liken the episode to inserting a beer commercial into Act III, Scene IV of Hamlet: “How now!  A rat?  Dead for a ducat, dead!”  “Life getting you down?  Try a Bud Light.  Tastes great, less filling.  It’s what all Danish princes drink.” 

The positive side of being subjected to such a flop is that the situation can do nothing but improve.  I have a sneaking suspicion that such a notion was at the fore in conceiving this mixed bill: Guillem and Murru in Marguerite and Armand; Bonelli in Pierrot Lunaire; what’s the big deal if La Fête étrange is terrible?  The programme will still end up strong on the whole.  And do you know what?  It did.  By the time the curtain had gone up on Federico Bonelli darting around scaffolding to Schoenberg’s score (Op. 21), I had completely forgotten about La Fête étrange. 

There can be little doubt that Pierrot Lunaire owes its singularity to Schoenberg’s music.  His Op. 21 was composed in 1912 for Albertine Zehme, a Viennese actress and singer who had studied the major Wagner roles with the composer’s widow, Cosima, and who wanted to create a melodrama – in this sense, the term means musical, or melodic, drama – in which a narrator joins forces with the orchestra in providing a dramatic soundtrack.  As David Nice writes, “Liszt and Strauss had both composed distinctive melodramas, but neither had gone so far as Schoenberg, who notates the reciter’s part in Pierrot Lunaire with fully written-out musical lines, a cross above or below each note indicating that the voice should observe the approximate pitch.  Only once in several songs does the injunction gesungen (sung) appear.  Schoenberg described the technique as Sprechstimme and in the preface to the published score gave detailed instructions as to its delivery.”

This incarnation of Pierrot Lunaire – there were two others, one choreographed by Léonide Massine in 1922, and another by Robert Joffrey in 1955 – was choreographed by Glen Tetley in 1962, and is set within a loose framework of twenty-one poems written by Albert Giraud.  Three dancers play roles modernized from the commedia dell’arte: Pierrot (Federico Bonelli) is the moonstruck white clown of innocence, harassed, inhabited, and moderately corrupted by Brighella (Edward Watson), the dark clown of experience; Columbine (Mara Galeazzi) is their female pawn, emerging from the wings in a progressively increasing state of debauchery in order to team up with Brighella in torturing poor Pierrot. 

Upon composing the score to Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg observed that his sounds become “an almost too animal and immediate expression of sensual and spiritual emotions.”  It wouldn’t make for good poster copy, but this sentiment is remarkably successful in conveying the feel of the ballet.  Bonelli does a wonderful job in the title role, infusing his character’s naiveté with the moon’s gentle wistfulness, and dances with as much power and expression as ever.  He is nature’s scion, and releases beauty effortlessly and centrifugally as he drifts through the phases of his life. 

Always at the ready to absorb Pierrot’s emissions is the great cynic, Brighella.  He is at once tormenter and teacher to Pierrot, and is therefore unsure of how to best make use of his vast experience.  Brighella mocks Pierrot for his innocence, but then decides to lead by example, clasping an imprisoning leg around a prone Columbine, and looking at his pupil to see if the idea’s registered.  Watson is terrific at the part, and has nearly as much stage presence as Bonelli.  Accordingly, the two create a dynamic of rivalry that couldn’t possibly exist in a less-balanced cast.  (See La Fête étrange.)  Watson is less powerful than Bonelli, but has a snap to his suppleness that the Italian lacks, and is so transfixing to observe that I was happy to overlook the fact that he was dressed like the Riddler.

The third ballet of the night was Marguerite and Armand, with Sylvie Guillem and Massimo Murru in the title roles.  Moving from Schoenbeg and Tetley to Liszt and Ashton is no small thing, and in this instance – if, in fact, there has ever been another instance – it served to shock the audience into what was, as it was performed last night, the perfect ballet. 

Guillem and Murru constitute a remarkable pair: they’re both incredibly strong and alarmingly present on stage.  What’s more, they seem very comfortable with one another, and give the impression that they’ve been dancing together for decades.  Ashton’s choreography makes the most of Liszt’s score (his B minor Piano Sonata), but Guillem and Murru give it frailty and bravado.  Both inhabit personal worlds drained of happiness, but drift back in time to happier days and, in doing so, effectively become ghosts. 

The story is very similar to La Traviata, only it unfolds in a non-linear fashion, its chapters lending the ballet a fast-paced feel that endeavours to symbolize the inexorable march of time.  After watching Guillem and Murru act out the final scene – a repentant Armand rushes to the dying Marguerite’s side, where, in one of ballet’s most moving pas de deux, the two bring their terrestrial relationship to a close with a final kiss – I found myself wondering what the world would be like if only Sylvie Guillem could sing.  Wilted in Murru’s embrace, her arms rose like vines to his neck, and with the last of her strength, she pulled her face to his, only for an instant, but one that seemed to freeze in time; as his grip tightened, any observer could see the life leave her body, and while she floated to the ground, I could hear Violetta sing: “Ah! io ritorno a vivere.  Oh gioia!” (I feel I’m coming back to life!  Oh, joy!)

Totally Zen

In the latest installment of Covent Garden's In Conversation series, Bruce Sampson interviewed Zenaida Yanowsky, the French-born, Spanish-trained ballerina.  I've long been a fan of Miss Yanowsky, and wholly agree with Sampson's observation that she consistently manages to make her roles, however small, seem absolutely crucial to the ballets in which they appear.  Not that she upstages her fellow dancers, mind you; as Zenaida put it, she simply "like's being part of a team, and as they build up, I go with them."  There's little doubt that her interpretive ability comes naturally, but at least some of it is due to a decade spent dancing seconary roles with the Royal Ballet. 

Whereas some are held back because of modest dancing ability, Zenaida's chief impediment to landing primary roles was without remedy.  At nearly six-feet-tall, she towered above most of her fellow dancers, including the men -- that is, those who hadn't been appropriated by Darcey Bussell and Sylvie Guillem, tall ballerinas both -- when she was on pointe.  To complicate matters, she was in a company that had a history of tiny ballerinas and fairly compact choreography.  MacMillan might have stretched out Ashton a bit, but things were seldom allowed to get beyond the restraints of the English idiom.  Having joined the company in 1994, it took her until last year to land her first full-length leading role: she danced Sylvia alongside David Makhateli, and then followed that up by dancing Odette/Odile in Swan Lake last December.  As things worked out, her partner, Roberto Bolle, couldn't make one of the performances, and Kenneth Greve was called in from the Royal Danish Ballet to dance the part of the Prince.  At 6'3, Greve was a good physical match for Zenaida, and quickly proved himself a complementary partner as well, thereby opening the door to future pairings and, accordingly, more lead roles for Yanowsky.

The two are currently rehearsing Manon, which, following years of anticipation on Zenaida's part, will open at the Royal Opera House on November 5th.  She told Bruce Sampson that she's being encouraged to "go bigger" in her movements; being told to "own the stage."  These directions must come as a considerable relief after dancing in an eggshell for the past decade, and if the dynamism of her modern dance performances is anything to go by, Yanowsky's Manon might give Guillem's a run for its money.   

Cultured Pearl

Leslie Howard tickled the keys the other night in the first of his three 30th anniversary concerts.  In case you're wondering, the pearl anniversary in question is meant to commemorate the pianist's first sally-forth onto the Wigmore stage, an even that, as history will happily verify, predated my birth by four years.  Howard chose an interesting programme, with Beethoven pieces acting as bookends to Schumann's mediocre Carnival Jest from Vienna and Liszt's incredible Sonata in B minor, S178. 

The first Beethoven was a sonata in A major, and was written for Baroness Dorothea von Ertmann, a friend of the composer.  Though Beethoven was suffering from the effects of ill-health at the time, the piece has, as Howard mentions in his programme notes, a "general bonhomie" that makes it a perfect concert opener.  Unlike the second Beethoven piece, the explosion-prone Battle Symphony of 1813 -- written to commemorate Wellington's victory against the French at the Battle of Vittoria, and in which we see Beethoven doing to God Save the Queen what Jimi Hendrix would do 156 years later to the Star Spangled Banner -- this sonata has a beautiful slow movement, and a terrific little fugue in its final allegro.  Howard played the piece well, in the very human (as opposed to highly technical) style that has become his hallmark over these past three-plus decades. 

As I mentioned earlier, the Liszt was phenomenal, and represented a virtually ideal collaboration between composer and performer.  The Sonata in B minor, S178 happens to be one of my favourite pieces of music, and I've found that it creeps farther up the top-25 list every time I hear it.  The music flows as freely as a country stream, it's themes either rising from the piano in a series of octaves, or rumbling along like juggernauts, making the floorboards jump with a succession of ff bass notes.  Once again, Howard's touch proved invaluable, in this instance lending personality to the piece's dissonance, and thereby saving it from the frostbite of overly-crisp technique. 

The remaining concerts are on Octover 25th and November 8th.  The former will team Howard up with Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, and Rakhmaninov; the latter with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Grieg, Sibelius, and Granger for a split personality affair consisting of a series of fantasias followed by a visit to Scandinavia.  Pack your toque, it should be fun.

Chancy Gardeners

Sadler's Wells.  October 15, 2005

The first scene in Angelin Preljocaj’s ballet, Le Parc, is a human chess match: women and men are dressed in coats and breeches, the former in white, the latter in black, as they expeditiously manoeuvre themselves to socio-sexual advantage.  Preljocaj calls the scene The Two Sexes Observe Each Other, but his choreography outdistances his title, adding an element of interactive exploration to his presentation of the aesthetics of the courting ritual.

Commissioned by the Paris Opéra Ballet in 1994, Le Parc was intended to explore the emotional territory surrounding the codes of conduct described in 17th and 18th century French novels like La Princesse de Clèves, Clélie, and, of course, Les Liaisons Dangereuses.  Unlike Adam Cooper’s recent dance adaptation of Liaisons, Preljocaj’s ballet treads lightly on the louche, focusing its attention instead on the ethos of libertinage.  Where Cooper’s Vicomte de Valmont was emotionally vampiric, Preljocaj’s male lead – danced impeccably by Yann Bridard – is tender, and somewhat nonplussed when it comes to romance.  His path to love is unclear, dimly illuminated by such allegorical devices as de Scudéry’s La Carte du Tendre (pictured above), but for the most part fraught with emotional peril.  He must rely on the sanguine machinations of The Gardeners – four be-goggled post-apocalyptic Cupids – to win the heart of his beloved (Laëtitia Pujol).  For their part, The Gardeners exist as two parts hand of fate to one part deus ex machina, luring Miss Pujol to a grey dreamscape through which she tumbles, like Alice down the rabbit hole, toward a repression-free existence with, quite literally, the man of her dreams.

There are several remarkable things about Le Parc.  For starters, Preljocaj’s choreography is very clever, and flows from satirical – a mass fainting spell that ends with half-a-dozen courtières toe-up on the stage – to racy – the sexes coming together for a hearty serving of on-stage writhing.  His three pas de deux for Bridard and Pujol – titled Encounter, Resistance, and Abandonment- respectively – are breathtaking, and bear a resemblance to Kim Brandstrup’s Two Footnotes to Ashton, which, it should be said, was choreographed a decade after Le Parc.  As the progressive titling of the dances suggests, Bridard and Pujol’s relationship to one another grows more intimate with each encounter: head-butts to the chest, initially employed defensively and with aggression, gradually shift purpose and, in Abadonment, gently cleave the couple together. 

A good portion of these pas de deux’s charm comes from the music.  As with much of the ballet, Preljocaj has set them to extracts from Mozart piano concerti, imbuing the pieces with a heightened sense of romance that is, for lack of a better term, enchanting.  We are shown a world that hovers above our own: a golden patina atop a creaky old table.  Preljocaj offsets this with The Gardeners desolate landscape, and rounds out the picture with the harsh electronic music one would expect to find in such a place.  The four men move with incredible precision – automatons of love – and the dancers – Mallory Gaudion, Simon Valestro, Nicolas Noël, and Adrien Bodet – are so convincing in their roles that one forgets one’s watching dancers perform choreography. 

In fact, one of the things that make the Paris Opéra Ballet so noteworthy is the strength of its corps de ballet.  As with an army, the strength of a company is dictated by the ability of its weakest members, and there’s little chance that even the most gifted principal can salvage a ballet that’s been dragged through the mud of mediocrity by a band of heavy-stepping character artists.  Le Parc’s choreography is mostly earthbound – only Bridard takes to the air, and even then it’s only for the occasional tour jeté – so good footwork is paramount, and the corps put on a veritable clinic.  As was the case with The Gardeners, one couldn’t help but identify the people on stage as the characters they played, rather than as the dancers they are, and, though it pains me to criticize the home team, the Royal Ballet could learn a thing or two in this regard from their Gallic neighbours to the south. 

A DVD recording of Le Parc is now available from Bel Air Classics.

Piece of Dobosh

Roby Lakatos is a violinist of spectacular ability, a man who waltzes effortlessly between musical genres, and possessor of one of the world’s most formidable moustaches.  On Thursday night he rolled up to LSO St. Luke’s with his ragtag bunch of Hungarian gypsy players to perform an assortment of tunes, most of which were based in the Hungarian folk idiom.  I say ragtag, but the fact of the matter is that these musicians have, to a man, received formal musical training from places the likes of the Béla Bartók Conservatory of Budapest.  Accordingly, they’re as comfortable playing Vittorio Monti's Csárdás as they are Chick Corea’s Ciflico, and segue from classical to folk, to jazz without batting an eyelash. 

Lakatos plays in the effortless style peculiar to virtuosi, and produces an incredibly consistent and mellifluous tone regardless of what he’s playing.  His only miss of the evening was a saccharine rendition of Legrand’s Papa Can You Hear Me, which he introduced as “a beautiful song from the film Yentl,” begging the question of when those words were last spoken in St. Luke’s.  Fortunately, he got the film tunes out of his system early on, and moved into more comfortable territory with a few of his own compositions and a Django Reinhardt medley.  His jazz improvisations were fairly impressive, and had the added benefit of him playing them in a classical, light swing style, which produced a unique musical entity that hovered between several genres – gypsy swing, classical, Latin jazz – yet had sufficient substance to exist on its own. 

Like all good bandleaders, Lakatos is a champion delegater, frequently stepping aside to let one of his musicians take the wheel a while.  Most notable in this group were Attila Rontó and Ernest Bangó, on acoustic guitar and cimbalom respectively. Rontó is a phenomenal soloist who seems to grow more comfortable as the music becomes more dissonant; he played remarkably creative solos over pianist Kàlmàm Csèki’s diminished seventh chords, and strung together some dynamic harmonic movement that served to fill out the pieces being played. Bangó is an impressive character.  He wears his hair greasy and pulled back, exposing a receding hairline that tapers to two sharp points at his crown.  He sits at his instrument cool as a Tibetan cow, hammering out one impossible melody after another with what, for all intents and purposes, looks like a pair of tampons attached to chopsticks.  The cimbalom is an instrument with 125 strings, a range of 4.5-5 octaves, bright treble, crisp bass, and to the layman seems impossible to play.  It’s the sort of instrument that spawns jokes such as “I bought a cimbalom in 1973 and have been tuning it ever since.”  Watching Bangó plunk out a tune at 300 bpm produces the same dizzying effect as watching a jazz vibraphonist go to work with four mallets: both are such astounding feats of hand-eye coordination that witnessing them makes one feel proud to be human. 

Rounding out the group was Lászlo Bóni, quite comfortable in the role of second violin, and Oszkár Németh on double bass, who spent the evening swaying to-and-fro with his instrument in the manner of a dutiful nephew treading the boards with a corpulent yet beloved great aunt. Bóni and Lakatos teamed up for a handful of showpieces performed duelling fiddle style, which culminated in a flurry of notes and a ferocious foot stomp that brought a grateful audience to its feet, and a terrific evening to a close.

My Northern Line, My Northern Line, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

Owing to ongoing safety concerns, the Northern Line, a.k.a the "Misery Line," has been out of commission these last few days and, by all accounts, its hiatus will run through the end of the weekend.  This has led to some interesting routes through town, and suffice to say none of them has been quick.  Still, things could be worse.  I'm currently charting a course to the Southbank, where tomorrow, for a couple of hours at any rate, I'll be in the company of Jacques Tati, as we bumble along with his alter ego in the 1953 classic, Les vacances de M. Hulot.  How better to relieve the stresses of daily existence than to revel in the merry mishaps of others?
 

The Horror! The Horror!

If anyone has ever wondered what Degas and Charles Addams' love child might have looked like - if indeed such thing were possible - they can now seek out an answer at the Royal Ballet.  The current mixed bill includes Flemming Flindt's The Lesson, a terrible tale of terpsichorean terror starring the inimitable - and extraordinarily tall - Zenaida Yanowsky as the pianist, Roberta Marquez as the yippy pupil, and Johan Kobborg in the role of the homicidal ballet teacher.   Adapted from Eugene Ionesco's play of the same name, The Lesson tells the story of a deranged and, I might add, ill-qualified teacher who, with the complicity of his alarmingly maternal pianist, lures students into his oily clutches only to dispatch them to the hereafter with impressive efficiency.  Kobborg plays the part brilliantly, first peeking around the doorjamb with sheepish apprehension, then slithering around more confidently, his hair stringy and plastered to his forehead, until finally he removes his coat, swells to twice his previous size, and demonstrates a barre maneuver seldom seen in ballet studios.  The attack is hugely violent, drawing gasps from the shocked audience, and reminding everyone that the ballet stage is still a place for drama and horror.
  As if to reinforce this notion, the Royal Ballet presented La Sylphide, a be-kilted moral fairytale starring Alina Cojocaru in the title role, with Ivan Putrov as James, a soon-to-be bridegroom.  Unfortunately, the reinforcement I speak of was negative, thanks almost entirely to Putrov's lack of acting chops and deficiency in a male lead role.  He's a fine dancer, there's no denying that, but his domain is the non-dramatic solo, and he seems utterly lost when he has to interact with people or, worst of all, sweep a woman off her feet (I mean this both literally and figuratively).  He's given two solos in La Sylphide, and they are brilliant - rays of sun burning through the fog - but he doesn't manage to maintain his energy and confidence beyond the last step.  It's difficult to get Cojocaru off form, but, like it or not, a ballerina depends on her male counterpart for strength, and Putrov just couldn't get the job done.  If only Kobborg had donned his dancing shoes instead of his producer's hat, La Sylphide might have been given the treatment it deserves.

Overheard From Seat C3

British Text Message Structuralists Discuss SMS Ethics:

Girlfriend: "I was slightly distressed, actually shocked, to see that you'd taken to using abbreviations in your text messaging.  Today you used 'u' rather than 'y-o-u.'"
Boyfriend: "I know.  I was thinking about it as I was doing it.  My phone tells me how many characters I have left to me, and I decided to employ a 'u' instead of the traditional 'y-o-u' so as to be able to put two kisses at the end."
Girlfriend: (laughs)"I'd have been far more distressed had you not done that."
Boyfriend: "You see, it was only thanks to a dire want of space that I resorted to such wanton butchery of the English language."