New York City Ballet: Ratmansky's Concerto DSCH and Balanchine's Scotch Symphony

(Janie Taylor and Tyler Angle in Alexei Ratmansky's Concerto DSCH. Photo by Paul Kolnik.)

Thurs, May 14 - I'm really loving New York City Ballet this spring season. Tonight's show was exceedingly will danced, and the choreography was great all the way through.

The last ballet of the evening was the one that left me on a real high. I was indifferent about Alexei Ratmansky's Concerto DSCH when I saw it first in February - I thought it was good, but I was so bored by the rest of that day's program that that Concerto DSCH barely registered. In better surroundings though, I was actually able to pay attention, and I found it is a marvelous, witty construction with recognizable human sketches at its core. The ballet has a central couple (Janie Taylor and Tyler Angle tonight), who we presume are romantically involved, and a group of three soloists (Ana Sophia Scheller, Joaquin De Luz and Gonzalo Garcia) who playfully romp around the stage, jumping, spinning and literally tossing each other around.

The ensemble is like a big group of friends hanging out at the beach, with all of the requisite romantic pairings, giggling groups spying on one another, and all of the joking and prodding of a day at play. One of my favorite moments occurs at the end of the second movement, after the central couple has performed a touching romantic pas de deux that grows from tentative to full love. The couple's friends come onto the stage, and the group then splits by gender - the girls drag the main girl off one side and the boys drag the main boy. Meanwhile the two of them can't help turning back to gaze at each other, while their friends giggle and keep dragging them off stage.

The dancing, set to Shostakovich's second piano concerto, is playful and seductive. I love the way Ratmansky moves groups of dancers onto, around and off the stage: it's a constant flow of activity. His steps are attractive and delightfully human, yet there's still plenty of room for the dancers to show off technically - DeLuz, Garcia and Scheller in particular. Still, these showoff moments were folded effortlessly into the ballet's overall playfulness: it added to the energy without becoming unnecessary spectacle, and it warmed your heart for the dancers even more. It's a great ballet, made great by the warmth you feel for the sketches of characters you see dancing on stage.

I was initially drawn to this performance to see the program's opener, Scotch Symphony, which I had never seen before. For some reason I thought it was one of the "major" Balanchine ballets (it was featured on an old television broadcast with Maria Tallchief, and I had read about it as Balanchine's tribute of sorts to La Sylphide), but while good, it's a fairly standard ballet. It is described as Balanchine's homage to the Scottish highlands: the men are costumed in kilts and Scottish regalia, the women in pink costumes with flowing Romantic-length skirts. The music is three movements from Mendelssohn's "Scottish" Symphony, which evokes images of Scotland with musical themes in the score. The main attraction is the central adage, which is really quite interesting and lovely, especially as performed at this performance by Jennifer Ringer and Benjamin Millepied in the main roles. But the corps movements seem like rehashed Balanchine - same old, same old without any of the particular inventiveness that characterizes the truly "major" Balanchine ballets. I looked up the work again when I got home, and realized that it's not performed as frequently as I had previously thought.

Nevertheless, the ballet provided a vehicle for Ringer, who gave a really spectacular performance. The middle movement really is very interesting, as she circles around Millepied then alternatingly flits away or is blocked from him by other Scottish men - one gets the sense that he is the outsider here, intruding upon the ballet's Scottish society and searching for his ideal love. In this way, the ballet vaguely recalls the Romantic ballet La Sylphide, which is also set in the Scottish highlands and features a story of a man chasing after a sylph in the forest. This revival also featured a new painted backdrop by Karol von Aroldingen. I have never seen the other backdrop, but this backdrop looked more like a surrealist desert or a Martian landscape than the Scottish highlands.

(Maria Kowroski and Sebastien Marcovici in Movements for Piano and Orchestra. Photo by Paul Kolnik.)

The double Balanchine ballets Monumentum pro Gesualdo and Movements for Piano and Orchestra worked especially well tonight. In my first viewing back in January, I found the works stilted and the performances tentative. But today the stark formalism of Monumentum and the angular neoclassicism of Movements looked positively clever and inventive. I've also warmed considerably to Maria Kowroski, and I liked her performances very much tonight. She has impossibly long legs and an easy flexibility that is very different from the rest of the company's - sometimes it looks too bendy and weird, but I thought that tonight (and in Firebird last week), she used her unique qualities to wonderful, intense effect. She was partnered by Ask La Cour in Monumentum and by Sebastian Marcovici in Movements.

Tarantella was next, a showy Balanchine duet that is vaguely gypsy in flavor. This work has never really appealed to me in the past, but my gosh it really zinged tonight - now I see that when it's done well, it can really fly, and tonight it nearly tore the roof down. Daniel Ulbricht and Tiler Peck, both fairly young dancers in the company, made it a a non-stop barrage of dance pyrotechnics and mayhem. Ulbricht stole the show in the male role with breathtaking jumps that seemed to freeze in mid-air and his silly, scene chewing stage persona. The audience just ate it up. Tiler Peck was wonderful as well (my gosh those pirouettes went on forever), but the more elegant female pyrotechnics were barely any match for Ulbricht's high-flying jumps.

All photos by Paul Kolnik: (1) captioned above; (2) Joaquin De Luz, Ana Sophia Scheller and Gonzalo Garcia in Ratmansky's Concerto DSCH; (3) Jennifer Ringer and Benjamin Millepied in Balanchine's Scotch Symphony; (4) captioned above; (5) Daniel Ulbricht in Balanchine's Tarantella.