New York City Ballet's fantastic start to its spring season: Concerto Barocco, La Valse and Symphony in Three Movements

Tues, Apr 28 - New York City Ballet's spring 2009 season got off to a very good start with today's performance of four Balanchine ballets. Despite my reservations about the company's performances during the winter season, I found this performance thoroughly enjoyable, and was excited to have some ballet after nearly two months without.

Concerto Barocco was first, with Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans dancing the central roles and Ellen Bar in the second soloist role. Where in February, the corps was just going through the motions back in February, at this performance much life had returned, and the dancing. Balanchine's inventive stage patterns and effortlessly unfurling steps captured me yet again, and Whelan gave a fantastically lyrical performance in the adage.

Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux is a short, virtuoso piece for two dancers - from my seat in the Third Ring of the theater, I saw the orchestra pit suddenly fill up with musicians for this short piece, with all of the musicians flooding in during the pause after Concerto Barocco. It was remarkable to think that there was such a huge strength in numbers from the pit for a ballet that is only two people and ten minutes long on stage. Ana Sophia Scheller gave her debut performance in the ballerina role on Tuesday, with Gonzalo Garcia - recently imported from San Francisco Ballet - in the male role. Scheller was delightfully spunky, and Garcia excitingly virtuosic in his solo moments. A joy to watch.

(Janie Taylor as the girl in white and Philip Neal as Death in Balanchine's La Valse. Photo by Paul Kolnik.)

La Valse is a moody, semi-abstract ballet set to Ravel's titular La Valse and the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales. I had really enjoyed the moodiness of it when I saw this ballet in January, with Miami City Ballet's excellent performance of the work, and this time around I enjoyed La Valse even more. I've just taken a year full of theater history in graduate school, recently looking at modern and expressionist theater and its historical context of world war and upheaval. So Balanchine's 1951 La Valse gained extra meaning in this viewing. There on stage was an evocation of0 pre-war Vienna and Europe, the whirling couples eerily enjoying its fragile wealth and society, dancing heedlessly into the arms of death as Ravel's music builds towards a chaotic collapse.

Janie Taylor danced the girl in white at this performance - she started with a charming innocence and glee at the beginning of the ballet, then thrillingly plunged into doomed hedonism in the final waltz with Death (danced by Philip Neal). The rest of the company gave decent supporting performances, but in the final section at times seemed to be rushing to meet the steps. Things seemed to fall apart as the corps was more concerned about accomplishing everything than actually dancing it. But overall, it was great to see this work again. Major credit must be given also to Fayçal Karoui and the New York City Ballet Orchestra, who gave an outstanding, concert-worthy performance of the score.

(The opening tableau of Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements. Photo by Paul Kolnik.)

The evening finished with Symphony in Three Movements, set to Igor Stravinsky's orchestral piece of the same name. It was not nearly as surprising and inventive this time as when I saw it back in January with Miami City Ballet. And I can't tell if it was because of New York City Ballet's dancing of it - Abi Stafford and Jared Angle were fine in the central role but not spectacularly bizarre like Miami's couple - or if the newness of the ballet itself had worn off for me.

A lot of it stood out as particularly dated, with 70s-era ponytails for the girls, pink practice costumes for the female principals that looked like escapees from the wardrobe room for A Chorus Line, and the frenzied power-walking bits in the first movement that looked like Twyla Tharp's sneaker ballets (which were also in particular vogue during the 70s). Because I expected them, some of the theatrical moments from before were not so fun, rather they were more studied - but was it because the company was more studied? I couldn't tell. There were enough moments that were still theatrically interesting, like the opening battalion line of girls lined up on diagonal, that I will want to see this ballet one more time before the season is out. And again, Karoui and the orchestra stepped it up in the pit with a bombastic musical performance of a fairly unusual score.