New York City Ballet, New York State Theater, New York, New York, January 6-March 1, 1998

Dance Magazine, June, 1998 by Robert Greskovic

NEW YORK STATE THEATER JANUARY 6-MARCH 1, 1998 REVIEWED BY ROBERT GRESKOVIC

New York City Ballet's 107th New York season spotlighted the thirtieth anniversary of Jewels, Balanchine's ground-breaking multiact "abstract" ballet. A seminar with isolated members of the original cast took place on the eve of the season. Among the tidbits offered was one about the ballet's now-familiar title. Apparently, Balanchine simply intended in April 1967 to present three new ballets, Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds; the overriding Jewels title came only after the first performance, when Clive Barnes's review noted that the singular evening of ballets could use a name.

To reinforce the Jewels celebration, the costumes were rebuilt and the season's publicity featured photos of Wendy Whelan and Philip Neal theatrically lighted and posed in moments from the "Diamonds" pas de deux. But Whelan didn't perform "Diamonds." She made her debut in "Rubies," and made less impact than she previously had made in "Diamonds." Though she was ably partnered by Nikolaj Hubbe, who shone in everything he danced all season, Whelan missed the role's silken sheen and smiling sass. Kyra Nichols, near full stride after her maternity leave, led "Diamonds" with nearly perfect majesty. In the season's very last Jewels, Miranda Weese performed her first "Rubies," and went into my own annals (twenty-eight years long) as the most thrilling and accomplished debut in this ballerina role since NYCB, women began following in the footsteps of the part's incomparable originator, Patricia McBride.

Weese also made a half-remarkable debut in the Violette Verdy role of "Emeralds," dancing the solo marvelously, but missing something in the pas de deux. Her partner, making his first appearance in "Emeralds," was the handsome and expert cavalier, Peter Hansen, who I hope one day to see dance the "Diamonds" cavalier--opposite Nichols, if I'm really lucky. In his "Diamonds" debut, Charles Askegard did well, but Hansen seems even better suited to the challenge. Now-we-see-her-now-we-don't Maria Kowroski made a shimmering debut in the Mimi Paul role of "Emeralds," then disappeared for the rest of the season due to injury. Though Monique Meunier was full of authority in her debut as the secondary ballerina in "Rubies," Michele Gifford and the radiant but unexpansive Aura Dixon were both out of their depth.

Compared to Balanchine's three "new ballets" from thirty years ago, this season's three new ballets appear less destined for longevity. Richard Tanner's Variations on a Nursery Song (to Ernst von Dohnanyi's music of the same name) featured the sublime Weese and semi-featured the noble Peter Boal; but its uncertain tone, toying with rather than glorying in the composition's witticisms about children's games and musical bombast, created a halfhearted mood. Alain Vaes's elegantly cut but dull-colored costuming and his bewildering and bland backcloth--a tombstone for a dead hair bow?--didn't help muck.

Peter Martins's Concerti Armonici ("Harmonic Concertos") is a close kin of his 1987 all-male exercise, Les Gentilhommes ("The Gentlemen"). The new ballet's title is a little misleading since if s not the concerti we get per se, but isolated movements from a six-part musical suite. (The eighteenth-century compositions were long thought to be by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi but are now identified as the work of Unico Wilhelm Graf van Wassenaer.) What we get in terms of ballet spectacle is a chill display from a large cast--two leading couples, three semiprominent men and six women, plus a general ensemble of six more men and six more women. William Ivey Long's ivory-colored semi-period costumes are at once austere and busy, the ruffles at the women's elbows reading like calcium deposits.

Though the agreeable sweep of canonic moves and the pleasing tracery of interlinked groupings help give the ballet eye-filling scale, the isolated, would-be arresting segments for the leading dancers (Whelan with Neal; H066e with Margaret Tracey) fail to establish much theatrical drama. In the case of the penultimate duet for Tracey and Hubbe, the choreography is so awkwardly "unusual," it looks most like what one audience member called "a rehearsal that's not going well."

Martins's Stabat Mater (to Pergolesi), reportedly a memorial to teacher Stanley Williams, aims toward contemplative mood and somber atmosphere. Vaes has designed a sepia-tinged decor--an ill-rendered false proscenium of Neapolitan (?) topography frames a stage set with an antique temple ruin as convincing as a store-window prop. (There are some nicely colored costumes--pale, filmy dresses for the women, strongly colored knickers and neutral tops for the men.) The choreography is dominated by droopy women who get lifted a lot, with some fussing with hands used as punctuation. Pergolesi's ecstatic "Amen" sequence is cut, leaving the mood in limbo without resolution.

For some reason an inordinately large number of debuts came in Balanchine's sublime but difficult Raymonda Variations. Of the nearly twenty dancers I saw perform the soloist variations, only four took complete charge of the intricate choreography: Samantha Allen, Jessy Hendrickson, Jennie Somogyi, and Alexandra Ansanelli. The rest needed at the very least more rehearsal; at the most, better schooling. Aesha Ash made a vivid debut in the von Aroldingen role of Who Cares?, and Nichols was, iridescent in the lead of in Memory of ....