New York City Ballet: Allegro Brillante, Hallelujah Junction, A Simple Symphony and The Four Seasons

(NYCB's box office, with a promotional image featuring Peter Martins' Hallelujah Junction.)

Wed, May 20 - This was my second performance in a double-header ballet day. Every spring, New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre go head to head right across the Lincoln Center from one another, and this year a programming quirk has both companies performing Balanchine's fifteen minute ballet Allegro Brillante at exactly the same time. Tonight at 7:30pm, the curtain went up at both the Koch Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera House on the exact same music and the exact same choreography. A comparison is inevitable, and New York City Ballet wins in this regard – it wasn't just Allegro Brillante, but the entire performance of four very different works was fantastically danced and great fun to watch.

New York City Ballet's performance of Allegro Brillante was fantastic, especially from Megan Fairchild and Andrew Veyette in the principal roles. It was a seamless performance from the moment the curtain lifted on the already dancing ensemble, all the way through to its swelling finale. On stage, it looked like everyone was dancing with a similar musical impulse. At ABT's performance earlier in the day, there were clear breaks between the ensemble bits and the soloist bits, and soloists stepped up and tried to make their moment in the sun stand out from the crowd. Here, at NYCB however, everything simply emerged and submerged as though a natural ebb and flow of the tide, soloists and ensemble dancers all part of the same group of mercurial beings. The ensemble was musically alive and danced joyously, while Fairchild and Veyette lead the proceedings with real authority.

Fairchild has an unforced technique that really dazzles in its speed and clarity: she uses it to thrillingly bring the music to life, and the energy that you hear in Tchaikovsky's cascading piano scales bursts forth on the stage when Fairchild zips across. Veyette's performance was wonderful for its nobility: he had the requisite technical brilliance, but didn't draw attention to it. The jumps and turns were folded into a cohesive performance that gave deference to his ballerina and to the music.

The choreography came across in an exceedingly vivid way tonight, and I noticed some things that I hadn't before. There is a moment after the women spin off stage where the men get a chance to shine, and I never quite noticed the stage patterns in the choreography before. The men jump forward towards the lower left corner of the stage - then the music cascades down in the musical scale, and at this performance I noticed that the men at this point elegantly bow, step backward, then jumps quickly in a circle to end up in a formal, presentational formation at center stage. It's elegant in its air of court formalism, yet filled with exciting jumps and turns, a perfect example of how ballet exists at that fine juncture of brilliant athleticism and refined beauty.

Where Allegro Brillante looked more traditional, with its more formal mannerisms and noble gentlemen, Peter Martins' Hallelujah Junction gave off a sleek, decidedly more contemporary feeling. The music is John Adams' eponymous 1998 composition for two pianos and the sound is at times pulsing, at others plaintive. Peter Martins, who is NYCB's director, created this ballet in 2001 for the Royal Danish Ballet, and brought it to New York City Ballet a few years later. It is set on a bare black stage, with the two pianos on platforms at the back of the stage, behind a scrim. The movement is the kind of spare neoclassicism that Balanchine pioneered, except even faster here, and in some ways more streamlined and liquid as well. The three principals – they were Sterling Hyltin, Gonzalo Garcia and Daniel Ulbricht at this performance – zip across the stage, pausing for a plaintive pas de deux in the middle section.

I really enjoyed this piece (I've seen it one other time, when City Ballet was on tour to Los Angeles), partly because I find Adams' piano music for it so interesting. Martins' response to the score and the ballet's visual look are all perfectly matched, and it is also great fun to see the dancers whizzing through the choreography. Daniel Ulbricht was really good today, with an ability to jump high and spin endlessly – he practically stole the show. In Hallelujah Junction he appropriately toned down the scenery-chewing persona that he usually gives (like in Tarantella last week, or Stars and Stripes). Steling Hyltin and Gonzalo Garcia were the central couple in white, and both of them were great as well. The eight-person corps de ballet was noteworthy also - I don't know them well enough to recognize who was dancing what, but each couple gets a major solo moment during the third movement, and many of them were very impressive as well.

(Melissa Barak's A Simple Symphony. Photo by Paul Kolnik.)

Former NYCB corps dancer Melissa Barak's new ballet A Simple Symphony seemed very tame compared to the thrills of Hallelujah Junction and Allegro Brillante. The piece, set to Britten's 1934 symphonic work of the same name, looked like old-fashioned ballet, with its light purple tutus and its orderly, formal ballet choreography. Balanchine's influence on Barak's work is apparent in the way she structures and uses the corps de ballet, arranging them in V patterns in the corners of the stage then moving them in unison back and forth around the principals. Still, Barak displays a remarkable fluency in composing choreography, and both in A Simple Symphony and in her recent work last year at Los Angeles Ballet, she shows a consistent ability to solid, eminently watchable choreography.

There are several moments of charming originality: in the pizzicato movement, first the principals, then the corps, then a demi solo quartet is seen hopping and bouncing around the stage in what starts out as seemingly random fun but which later reveals itself to be a pre-determined choice as patterns emerge and fold back into one another. The ballet stops short of a triumph in that it follows Britten's score a bit too literally, providing only pretty when the music suggests perhaps more. But like the other work of hers that I have seen, it's a promising work, and I'm interested to see her further develop as a choreographer.

Jerome Robbins' The Four Seasons closed the evening on a happy, joyous note. It was a very fun ballet to watch, with its colorful sets and costumes and witty pleasures in the choreography. Robbins used the ballet divertissement that Verdi composed for the opera I Vespri Siciliani, back when opera composers created fluffy entertainment ballets to be performed in the middle of operas as a kind of break from the action. The ballet music is not performed with the opera anymore, and here Robbins' uses the music as a sort of tribute to these grand divertissements from a bygone era.

Robbins' ballet begins as a grand pageant, with a master of ceremonies greeting four elaborately costumed representatives from each of the four seasons. From here, the ballet goes into each season: Winter is silly fun with the girls standing on the stage shivering to the spiky violins of Verdi's score before the central trio of dancers comes in to perform. The Spring section is a, well, springy pas de deux framed by an ensemble; tonight Jennifer Ringer and Tyler Angle danced it, and it was a highlight of the ballet. Summer has a leggy, luxurious duet, tonight danced by Rebecca Krohn and Amar Ramasar. Autumn is a pure shot of energy, with some seriously crowd-pleasing pyrotechnics in the principal roles. Tonight, there was a very exciting performance from Tiler Peck – whose turns seemed to go on forever, with nary a wobble – as well as very impressive work from Benjamin Millepied and Antonio Carmena as well. This was the kind of ballet that sent you out of the theater with a smile on your face.

Production photos by Paul Kolnik: (1) credited above, my photo. (2) Megan Fairchild and Andrew Veyette in Allegro Brillante, choreographed by George Balanchine. (3) Peter Martins' Hallelujah Junction, pictured with Andrew Veyette, Janie Taylor and Benjamin Millepied. This performance featured Gonzalo Garcia, Sterling Hyltin and Daniel Ulbricht in the same roles. (4) Melissa Barak's A Simple Symphony, credited above. (5) Tiler Peck in the Autumn section of Jerome Robbins' The Four Seasons.