LINCOLN CENTER

David Koch Theater
New York City Ballet

Swan Lake - Tchaikovsky

We're back to the ballet!
It felt good to be back in Lincoln Center last night for the opening of the Philharmonic's season.  It'll be good to return to the Koch Theater, one of our favorites, for the NYCB.
This season is going to be our best so far.  We're excited!

A stunning and powerfully romantic tragedy, Swan Lake was last performed in 2013 to sold-out houses. This seminal ballet is shaped by Tschaikovsky’s heartbreakingly beautiful score and the central role of Odette/Odile, an interpretation that is both technically and emotionally demanding. 

 

 


In 1996 the Royal Danish Ballet presented Peter Martins’ new full-length version of Swan Lake, the last of the enduring 19th-century Russian ballets. Although it was also the last of the famed Tschaikovsky-Petipa classics, Swan Lake was actually the composer's first ballet score. It was commissioned in 1875 by the Moscow Imperial Theater, now the Bolshoi Theatre. Tschaikovsky, who thought that ballet was "the most innocent, the most moral of the arts," suggested the libretto. Years earlier, as a family entertainment, he had composed a short ballet based on a German fairy tale about a wicked sorcerer who turns young girls into birds.

Amazingly, the choreographer of the 1877 Moscow premiere (not Petipa) was not inspired by Tschaikovsky's glorious music, the conductor didn't like the score either, and the ballerina declared it too difficult to dance to and substituted her favorite music and choreography from other ballets. The composer blamed himself for the failure and would not write another ballet score for 12 years. When he resumed, it was to compose The Sleeping Beauty in 1890 and The Nutcracker in 1892. Tschaikovsky died the following year. As a memorial, the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg mounted a production of just the first lakeside scene, Tschaikovsky's second act, where the Prince meets the Swan Queen. Czar Nicholas II was so impressed by the new choreography of Petipa's assistant Lev Ivanov that he ordered the entire ballet be produced, with Petipa staging the first and third acts. It is this 1885 St. Petersburg production with the dual role of Odette and Odile that is the basis for the classic ballet we see today.

While retaining the well-known set pieces from the traditional version by Petipa and Ivanov, Mr. Martins has imbued his production of Swan Lake with the speed and clarity that New York City Ballet is known for. The lakeside scenes are based on the choreography of Balanchine's one-act version. For the divertissements of the "Black Swan" scene, Martins has created a sensuous Russian dance intended as an homage to the exoticism of the early 20th-century Russian artist Leon Bakst. Martins has also set a pas de quatre for three ballerinas and a danseur with complex step combinations and intricate partnering unheard of in the 19th century.

For this production Martins invited Denmark's leading artist, Per Kirkeby, to design the scenery and décor. Kirkeby's paintings, sculpture, and graphic art have been exhibited at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, the Venice Biennale, New York's Museum of Modern Art, Prague's National Gallery, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, London's Barbican Center, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, as well as numerous galleries throughout the world, including the Michael Werner Gallery in New York. Kirkeby is also a writer, geologist, filmmaker, and performance artist who has published more than 60 books of poetry, novels, and essays. Kirkeby's costumes for New York City Ballet's Swan Lake are based on the original costumes he designed in collaboration with Kirsten Lund Nielsen for the Royal Danish Ballet production. The evocative lighting design is by Mark Stanley.

Review: ‘Swan Lake’ Features an Authoritative Sara Mearns

Sara Mearns, leading the first of four casts of “Swan Lake” and opening New York City Ballet’s four-week fall season at the David H. Koch Theater on Tuesday, has moved light years beyond the melodramatic clichés with which this ballet is usually saddled. The foolish “Black Swan” notion of this ballet makes Odette the good, passive victim and Odile the actively evil demon, while Prince Siegfried looks like a moron for thinking one could be the other. Ms. Mearns, however, interpreting the double role with completely authoritative individuality, makes both heroines arrestingly multilayered. Her Odette reveals a capacity for voluptuous passion within doomed captivity; her Odile is extraordinarily cool, enigmatic, even poignant, notwithstanding sweeping brilliance.

Peter Martins’s 1996 production takes Tchaikovsky’s score at a generally fast tempo. Ms. Mearns, never rushed by this, creates marvelous dynamic variety within it, often finding time to phrase with seeming slowness, while rising to its briskest passages as if riding the full power of a wave. Though she stumbled toward the end of Odile’s fouetté turns on Tuesday, nothing interrupted the dramatic impetus of her performance. Her partner as Prince Siegfried was Tyler Angle; his dancing is elegant, his acting gallant, relatively lightweight and without any of the specificity that makes Ms. Mearns’s performance important moment by moment.

Under Daniel Capps, who conducts all eight of these “Swan Lake” performances, there was good orchestral playing; one strikingly fine oboe solo stood out. Occasionally, Mr. Capps suddenly slowed the pulse of a dance, apparently to accommodate a dancer, as during the ballroom solo for Mr. Angle; the effect was clumsy.

These performances of “Swan Lake” are dedicated to the memory of Albert Evans, ballet master, teacher and former principal of City Ballet; his death in June stunned and grieved many. But I wish that the company honored his memory by not casting solely black dancers in the role of the villain Rotbart; though Silas Farley delivered the role’s theatrics incisively on Tuesday, he has long been ready for something more rewarding.

Rotbart, with his flamboyant orange flames-of-hell cloak, epitomizes all that’s most obviously silly (a lot) about Mr. Martins’s production and Per Kirkeby’s designs. You can’t believe that the men who shaped the production take this character seriously, so why should you? Color schemes throughout are terrible in conception and execution. It’s bad enough that all the first scene’s corps women are dressed in green, but why are some in more garish shades than others? Why is the garden pas de trois danced by two women in unbecoming mixtures of white, green and brown, and a man (Benno) in scarlet slashed with blue? And the bare-midriff Russian dance looks grotesque.

Bringing young talent to light will be an important part of this week’s performances. The four casts include no fewer than 39 role debuts (though 10 of these are as the princesses whom Siegfried ignores).

I also admire the way that City Ballet, unlike most companies today, doesn’t treat “Swan Lake” as a vehicle for two star principals alone. Seven other principals were on view on Tuesday (at the Royal Ballet in the 1970s, I sometimes saw 11 principals in this ballet’s supporting roles); and the company as a whole made the best case for this staging I’ve seen. I was even persuaded for the first time that the final scene can work without the immolation of the two principals. As with Racine’s play “Bérénice,” the necessity for the two lovers to separate forever is tragedy enough.

Mr. Martins’s talent is bizarrely uneven. The few steps he gives to the 16 children in the opening garden scene’s waltz are among the freshest moments here; the School of American Ballet performers were all bloom and grace. But his additional choreography for adults — especially for solo women — all looks like thankless obstacle courses. Nonetheless, Brittany Pollack (in the pas de trois) and Tiler Peck and Joaquin de Luz (in the ballroom pas de quatre) found a constant supply of wit and color. Though they couldn’t make their solos interesting, they certainly made themselves look distinguished.

Daniel Ulbricht’s performance as the Jester (a terrible part — “Swan Lake” should be a Jester-free zone) used to be all tiresomely intrusive perkiness. Now, with no loss of spot-on timing, he’s toned down its excesses. (In June, this dancer’s debut as Oberon in George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was an important indication that he wants to move beyond the glib flash that used to characterize too many of his performances.) Gwyneth Muller is finding different shades within the Queen’s mime gestures. The female corps de ballet danced with power and passion. But, thanks to Mr. Martins, this “Swan Lake” is less than the sum of its parts.