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Don Q preview
Quixote at ABT, plus Who Cares? and Robert Schumann’s ‘Davidsbündlertänze’ at NYCB
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

NEW YORK — Of all the pre-20th-century ballet classics, Don Quixote may be the most problematic. The title character, Miguel de Cervantes’ idealistic dreamer, is a non-dancing role. The real leads are innkeeper’s daughter Kitri and barber Basilio, who want to marry; her father, Lorenzo, has his eye on foppish nobleman Gamache as a son-in-law, but with a little help from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza the lovers get their way. In outline the story is similar to La Fille Mal Gardée, but whereas Frederick Ashton’s staging of that ballet is jam-packed with characterization, most Don Quixotes (George Balanchine’s is altogether different) call for pyrotechnics rather than plot. If the two American Ballet Theatre performances I saw a couple of weeks ago at the Met didn’t quite fill the stage with fireworks, they did throw down the gauntlet to Boston Ballet’s 2003-2004 season-opening production of this work.

Don Quixote’s dance history goes back to a mid-18th-century Viennese production by Jean Georges Noverre, but the source of most modern versions is Marius Petipa’s 1869 staging for the Bolshoi as revised in 1902 by Aleksandr Gorsky and first presented in America in 1966, by the Bolshoi at the Met. The ABT Quixote that’s available on video is a 90-minute 1983 production choreographed by then ABT artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov " after Petipa and Gorsky " and starring Baryshnikov and Cynthia Harvey as Basilio and Kitri; choreography for the current ABT version is credited only to Petipa and Gorsky. Boston Ballet’s Quixote goes back to 1982, when Rudolf Nureyev set it on the company and danced Basilio. Nureyev includes a sequence with Sancho Panza getting teased by the local girls in act one and a Hamlet-like puppet show in act two; otherwise the two versions are similar. Some stagings place Basilio’s mock suicide in act one and give us a duel between Basilio (disguised as a knight) and Don Quixote in act three, but these two move the " suicide " to act three and omit the duel, creating a more appropriate lead-in to the wedding celebration.

A Don Quixote that was more about the title character would be a more cogent ballet, but our dreamer is invariably left to try to find some dignity in his doddering, and we’re left with the showpieces. Apart from Basilio and Kitri in the first act, we get matador Espada and street dancer Mercedes (in Boston she’s just an unnamed street dancer). Act two, in which Basilio and Kitri run off to a Gypsy camp, brings the Gypsy Man and Woman; after Don Quixote makes his abortive assault on the windmill and falls into a recuperative sleep, there’s the classical purity of the Vision Scene, with Kitri appearing as Dulcinea alongside Amour and the Queen of the Dryads. Act three, after Basilio’s " suicide, " is the wedding fiesta, with Espada and Mercedes (in Boston different from the first-act street dancer) showing off more tricks and Basilio and Kitri doing a climactic pas de deux.

The big moment Saturday afternoon came in the first act when Angel Corella elevated Xiomara Reyes in a star lift and held her there, with one hand, for a good five seconds while she beat out an accompaniment on her tambourine. Corella’s trademark corkscrew pirouettes go all too quickly from gosh! to gimmick, but in the third act he compensated with a tour pas de chat that turned into a breathtaking split jump, and for all its flamboyance, his Basilio wasn’t shallow. Reyes’s Kitri and Dulcinea were even more breathtaking: in the pas de deux her firepower matched and outmatched his. What I missed was projection, especially in her Kitri. Perhaps that’s because the role is new (she’d made her debut just 10 days earlier), or perhaps she needs a less extroverted partner than Corella.

Saturday evening Ethan Stiefel was a more thoughtful Basilio, giving us pirouettes with phrasing, and Gillian Murphy brought a touch of Alicia Silverstone to her Kitri, with high kicks that were showy but not snapped off and nippy pointe work in her third-act pas de deux variation, though she wobbled badly on the two occasions when she had to stand unsupported on pointe in attitude. The Saturday-evening Mercedes, Veronika Part, filled out her phrases with a size and softness that the afternoon’s more acerbic Sandra Brown didn’t command, and the evening’s Quixote, Brian Reeder, seemed less pathetic and more poignant than the afternoon’s Victor Barbee; on the other hand, Carmen Corella, as the evening’s Dryad Queen, struggled with her Italian fouettés.

No one made the kind of indelible impression Nina Ananiashvili does on the State Perm Ballet video (from a 1992 performance in Tokyo). It’s not just the 32 fouettés, which she begins with her hands on her hips and executes at a phenomenal speed — it’s the teasing multiplicity of character and her radiant, self-effacing joie de danser. I wish the calendar had permitted me to see her with Marcelo Gomes at ABT. Instead, I wound up catching WGBH’s repeat airing of the documentary Born To Be Wild: The Men of ABT last Wednesday (an appetizer for the irritating Lar Lubovitch/San Francisco Ballet Othello that followed) and wondering whether the ABT/NYC spotlight invariably turns artists into performers. Early clips of Corella, Stiefel, Vladimir Malakhov, and José Manuel Carreño revealed a freshness and spontaneity one doesn’t often see at Lincoln Center. And the hour’s through-line did little to showcase their talents: looking more than ever like Peter Pan, Mark Morris set a seven-minute number on the quartet that came off like a Foursome outtake, or a parody of Jules Feiffer’s odes to spring.

Postscript: on the Monday following these performances, without explanation, ABT executive director Elizabeth Harpel Kehler resigned. She had been the company’s third executive director in as many years, following Louis G. Spisto (who according to the New York Times " was forced to resign in 2001 amid accusations of mismanagement " ) and Wallace Chappell, who served for 10 months before being moved to the Strategic Planning Committee. It’s a reminder that Boston Ballet isn’t the only company going through turbulent times.

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE wasn’t performing on Sunday, but regardless it would have been hard to pass up the two Balanchine masterpieces, Who Cares? and Robert Schumann’s " Davidsbündlertänze, " at New York City Ballet. It was a strange bill: less appetizer than scrumptious dessert, Who Cares? nonetheless led off, and though you wouldn’t think that anything but another Balanchine work could follow Robert Schumann’s " Davidsbündlertänze, " NYCB finished off the afternoon with Jerome Robbins’s 1983 Glass Pieces. No problem for Anna Kisselgoff, who wrote in last Friday’s Times that the work is " cool Robbins: he keeps his emotional images under tight control as if to complement the rigorous structures of Philip Glass’s minimalist music. " But for me it’s Twyla Tharp whose extravagances complement Glass’s music; Robbins just makes it seem redundant. From the corps in practice clothes criss-crossing the stage in front of a yellow grid to the rote duet in front of a rote moving-corps shadow backdrop to the Iron John gathering of men, nothing on stage seemed as interesting as what was coming from the orchestra pit.

Who Cares? is the first work Balanchine choreographed after Suzanne Farrell married Paul Mejia and, in 1969, left NYCB; the answers to the title question are " Suzanne who? " and " I do. " Drawing on 17 Gershwin songs (now 16, the penultimate " Clap Yo’ Hands " having been dropped in 1976), Balanchine reclaimed his New York, the city of O. Henry and Damon Runyon, of innocent guys and almost-innocent girls, in a piece that, like Apollo, pairs one man with three ladies. It was a nostalgic sensibility even then; three decades and September 11 later, it’s not easy to recapture. In the early going, the ladies’ pelvic thrusts and Rockette kicks looked pro forma; I remember these as having more energy when Boston Ballet did the piece in 1995. But the New York State Theater heated up when Janie Taylor and Charles Askegard came on for " The Man I Love, " Taylor expressing her feeling in the articulation of her hands and the feline way she picked up her feet. Hers is a body language that speaks — maybe that’s why, with no one to talk to, she had fractionally less to say in her sassy " Fascinatin’ Rhythm " solo.

Jennie Somogyi was likewise less voluble with Askegard in " My Sweet Embraceable You " : I missed the way Kyra Strasberg used her shoulders to control the distance between herself and Olivier Wecxsteen back in 1995, and the teasing glance Jennifer Gelfand threw Patrick Armand as she ran off stage. Abi Stafford showed more energy than attitude in her " I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise " solo and her " Who Cares? " duet with Askegard. But he sold his " Liza " solo with a Frank Sinatra–like swagger, and the ensemble attacked the " I’ve Got Rhythm " closer with a crispness that suggested that, sans Farrell, sunshine, music, and rhythm might just be enough.

Robert Schumann’s " Davidsbündlertänze " sans Farrell is another matter. It’s not that Darci Kistler, who danced Farrell’s original role on Sunday, is bad, but there are too many places where Balanchine’s choreography looks form-fitted on Farrell and Farrell looks form-fitted on Schumann’s music. In the schizoid polka of 1.8 (DBT comprises two " books " of nine piano pieces each), Schumann elides what would normally be eight bars into seven, or four into three, so that the music seems to be going in two directions at once; and that’s just what Farrell looks to be doing on the 1981 Balanchine Library video. On Sunday in this section, Kistler looked like a deer frozen in the headlights, always still where Farrell is always moving.

That polka is a microcosm of both Schumann’s work and Balanchine’s. Schumann wrote DBT in 1837 as a " polterabend " present for his beloved Clara, and though he drew heavily on the doppelgänger mentality of his favorite writer, the German Romantic Jean Paul, this piece, with its ländler-waltzes and polkas and tarantella and manic minuet, has many faces; one of its many jokes is the way he undresses the motto theme he’s borrowed from Clara as if it were his bride-to-be. Balanchine apportioned RSD among four couples: one whose lady is skittish and self-absorbed (Farrell and Jacques d’Amboise on the video), one whose man is anguished and self-absorbed and whose lady is tender and caring (Karin von Aroldingen and Adam Lüders), one extroverted and exuberant (Heather Watts and Peter Martins), one introverted and intimate (Sara Leland and Ib Andersen). During book two, the second couple begin to detach themselves from the " Davidsbund, " or League of David against the literary and musical Philistines of Schumann’s time; in the concluding 2.9, the man’s anguish overwhelms him, and as the piano tolls its 12 low C’s, he slips away from the lady and into darkness, reflecting Schumann’s drift into madness.

It’s not just Kistler who’s taking RSD in a different direction. Jock Soto, her partner Sunday, was far more aggressive than d’Amboise, seeming to demand what Kistler was reluctant to give, though like d’Amboise he had an odd way of hunching his head down into his shoulders. There’s a moment in 1.5 where d’Amboise barely seems to touch Farrell even as he holds her horizontal; Soto turned Kistler almost upside down. Kyra Nichols and Charles Askegard conjured Aroldingen and Lüders in the way they gave volume to on-stage pianist Richard Moredock’s slow tempos (largely duplicating those of Gordon Boelzner on the video), but the third and fourth couples, Jennie Somogyi with Nilas Martins and Jennifer Ringer with Peter Boal, looked like the ghosts of the original, as if they’d gotten the piece second-hand. There were good moments — Somogyi and Martins with their stormy 2.1 polka, Ringer and Boal in the slow turns and deep bends of 2.2 — but the complexity of the whole seemed to elude them.

Writing for this newspaper back in 1986, Laura Jacobs described RSD as " equal parts air and impulse " and went on to suggest that " It strikes you not only as perishable but as immaterial too, wrought from the tissues of two lives. " The ballet does take on solid flesh in Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s Caspar David Friedrich set, and sullied flesh in Balanchine’s unfortunate choice of Schumann’s more conventional 1850/’51 revision, which adds repeats, fills in textures, truncates the quirky endings of 1.9 and 2.6, and substitutes a reassuring D-natural for the unsettling D-flat of 1.8 (if only Mr. B could have heard Maurizio Pollini’s explosive, unbalanced recording of the 1837 DBT). But in 2003, without Balanchine and Farrell and the rest of the original cast, it seems more perishable and immaterial than ever.

Issue Date: June 27 - July 3, 2003
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