Los Angeles Ballet: Three by Balanchine and a new work by Melissa Barak

(Bows after Melissa Barak's new ballet, Lost in Transition. Barak stands on the left, in the silver shirt, with the cast.)

Los Angeles Ballet began its second repertory season last Friday with a solid program of mostly Balanchine ballets, plus the premiere of a promising new work by company member Melissa Barak. It's not easy to have your new ballet set in between the work of the 20th century's most celebrated classical choreographer, but Barak's work held its own against George Balanchine's monumental The Four Temperaments, his candy-coated tribute to Americana Who Cares? and the short but sweet pas de deux Tarantella.

Called Lost in Transition, Barak's attractive ballet was set to the first, third and fourth movements of Edgar Meyer's Double Concerto for Cello and Double Bass, and finishes with the second movement from Meyer's Concerto in D Major for Double Bass and Orchestra. The choice of music was great - distinctly contemporary and aurally interesting, very intense music with a throughline to dance to. Barak has a clear sense of structure and how to develop choreography in a theatrically interesting way, establishing a "theme" movement at the start of a section, then twisting away from it before referring back and redeveloping it in another direction. Her ballet was always on the move, and the movement never grew tiresome or boring. Costumed in metallic blues, reds and greens, the ballet had a distinctly neoclassical look and feel. Her influences are fairly apparent: a former member of New York City Ballet's corps de ballet, she spent many years dancing choreography by City Ballet's artistic director Peter Martins and the company's resident choreographer Christopher Wheeldon. The ballet's machine and industrial look - direct from above columns of harsh light, the metallic leotards - shares a lot with Martins' work, though Barak's work has more softness and humanity, and her complex, twisting pas de deux take after Wheeldon's experiments in the same. Though her work as yet does not have its own distinct voice, the ballet was very enjoyable and highly developed at such an early stage - a very promising new work.

A sturdy performance of Balanchine's The Four Temperaments opened the evening. This ballet is brilliant in its seeming simplicity: classical ballet stripped bare of jeweled tutus and tiaras and clothed instead in plain, black and white practice clothes. The choreography exposed and presented straightforwardly, without flourishes and tricks. Balanchine seems to have deconstructed classical technique into its barest parts, then reassembled it in his own, contemporary language. Even though it was created in the 1940s, it still reads like a contemporary ballet. The ballet is performed in abstraction, with no direct theme manifesting itself on stage, the titular temperaments coming through Paul Hindemith's musical score (though one could argue that, since Balanchine drew such subtle emotion from the score, the choreography might also be infused with the feelings of the medieval temperaments).

This ballet works when the choreography is danced clean and securely, which the two-year-old Los Angeles Ballet does very well. Through Neary's coaching - she received instructions from Balanchine himself, and can be seen on the recent Choreography by Balanchine DVD in the ballet's Sanguinic portion - the dancers have received a very strong understanding of putting forth Balanchine's ballets, and the subtleties and musicality came forth quite well. This is one of my favorite ballets and it isn't often performed well enough to show others why it is one of my favorites. Though it was not the best performance of 4T's that I have ever seen (it wasn't transcendent), it was still wonderful to see this ballet done as well as it was. Soloists were Sergey Khelik, emotional in the Melancholic section; Corina Gill and Peter Snow, slightly raw but still sharp in the Sanguinic; Andrew Brader, a bit over the top in Phlegmatic; and Lauren Toole, powerful and secure in the Choleric.

My reaction to the program's closing piece, Who Cares?, usually mirrors its title. Set to classic George Gershwin songs arranged for orchestra by Hershey Kay, this Balanchine ballet is frothy to the extreme, and I often find it odd to watch classical dancers forcing Broadway style smiles onto their faces. Nevertheless, I liked Los Angeles Ballet's performance the most of the many unfortunate times that I have sat through this ballet. The company's earnest, try-their-hearts-out style made the ballet joyful, plus being in the intimate space of UCLA's Freud Playhouse was very helpful as well. I was still annoyed at the ballet about halfway through - like eating way too many rich, sugary cookies in one sitting - but still you have to give the company credit for its earnestness. Melissa Barak memorably danced the solo role in "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise" and "Who Cares?"

Balanchine's showpiece pas de deux Tarantella filled out the evening, in between Barak's new ballet and Who Cares? The short dance lasts only about 10 minutes, with no pause, just straight virtuoso dancing from short supported duet into multiple variations for the male and female dancers. Here it was danced with verve if not outright flash by Corina Gill and Rainer Krenstetter, the company's two de facto stars (Gill has taken principal roles in many of the company's major ballets, and she and Krenstetter led the holiday Nutcracker performances).

To reuse a word I started this review with, the program gave a very solid evening of ballet, and an especially strong showing for a new classical company in its second year of operation. Melissa Barak's Lost in Transition was a great vouch for new ballet in the last two weeks (I was so disappointed in the new Alexei Ratmansky ballets that Lost in Transition was a break of fresh air), and the company's clean performances of the Balanchine repertoire are worth seeing, just to see Balanchine done well.