So let us think happily upon the snowy sparkle and holiday festivities that are the gifts of the gods, nature abundant, and Tchaikovsky. In the latest issue of The New Criterion, Laura Jacobs writes about the origins of The Nutcracker and ABT's new production choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky: "Nutcracker: a New Awakening."
Like Tchaikovsky?s two earlier ballets, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, you can listen to the score of The Nutcracker and see exactly what is happening at any given moment. The overture?bright, heightened, its twinkling sensation achieved by scoring that leaves out the ground floor of the orchestra (the brass, bassoons, and double basses)?captures the first blessed stars of Christmas Eve. Or as Rattle hears it, ?The whole thing is like the top of a Christmas tree.? The music that brings us into the Silberhaus home meanders a bit, frets, capturing that feeling of suspension before guests arrive, and the party that follows is vividly rendered: the anarchic attacks of the boys, the maternal play of the girls, the formalities of the adults, the ominous energies of the inventor Drosselmeyer, who is the godfather of Clara Silberhaus. Tchaikovsky?s cinematic score is as precise as a battle plan. And when the Christmas tree begins to grow, animated by Drosselmeyer, the ballet lifts into another place altogether. It is here that the orchestral floor, like a forest understory, comes alive. The theme of the growing tree is an eleven-note scale that repeats upward with growing strength. Tchaikovsky turns these climbs into long garlands, hanging one after the other, the first starting at the top of the tree in the strings. As the thematic climb continues, the tonal coloration of the garlands spirals downward to the orchestral roots?the basses, then the brass. The musical structure is a double helix, and its effect is one of subterranean stirrings, a nascence growing in the dark like bulbs in the basement or human pubescence, its anxieties and longings, its pleasurable pain, hormonally triggered. ?All the soarings of my mind,? the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, ?begin in my blood.?
New York balletomanes are fiercely attached and partial to Balanchine's Nutcracker at NYCB, which has become a holiday rite-of-passage tradition in which so many children get their baptism into ballet, while Mark Morris's campy Hard Nut appeals to the smarty-panties. But ABT's Christmas treat has its own distinctive charms and beauties.
This last December, American Ballet Theatre unveiled a new production of The Nutcracker?the third in its history?at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Its choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky, who is currently ABT?s artist in residence, has given the company a traditional staging of the ballet while taking a few well-conceived liberties, such as opening the ballet in the kitchen, where the aproned staff prepare for the party, and we get our first glimpse of a mouse. Richard Hudson, the set-and-costume designer, provides excellent support. For Act I he has created sets of cool clarity?Biedermeier, circa 1810. And his backdrop for the Snow Scene, moonstruck silver birches which freeze into a pattern of hoarfrost, is stunning. With the costumes of Act II, Hudson outdoes himself, beginning with the Sugar Plum Fairy, who in this production is not a ballerina role but a sort of Orientalist Madonna in shades of peacock blue, lilac, and jade?like a sweetmeat from the pen of Hilary Knight. The eye-popping silhouettes and colors?tassels, stripes, zigzags, crazy quilts?get richer with each divertissement, but are disciplined enough to keep the production looking focused.
Ratmansky, too, is more disciplined than we?re used to seeing. I think this is due to the children. In the past I?ve not been impressed with Ratmansky?s storytelling. He lets himself off too easy, leaning on the same choreographic strategies, settling for irony, and not pushing hard enough for a human touch, a poetic sense of gesture. His characters tend to be abstractions, their dance phrases jammed with steps that exude a frenzied virtuosity but not much else. Working with the children in this ballet, who carry a large part of the storytelling, Ratmansky has had to make phrases that are simpler, more direct, and more true. This imperative has led to moments both hilarious and poignant. I loved the Nutcracker doll?s dance of demonstration, in which he?s a whirring little wonder spitting out nuts faster and faster. And when the doll becomes a real boy, his upper body lays back, his arms fall open, and in stillness he takes the measure of grace. Ratmansky has added a brazen little mouse to the story, a tiny thing with skinny legs and a big belly who taunts and flees like Jerry in Tom and Jerry. I saw Justin Souriau-Levine in the role and you could tell he was having the time of his life.
[snip]
At the first performance of this Nutcracker?a preview that looked and felt like a premiere?Veronika Part and Marcelo Gomes danced the principal roles of the adult Clara and her Prince. It was right that they should, given that the choreography for these roles appears to have been inspired both by the palpable trust of their partnership and by Part?s special quality of brimming technical purity?a snowy simplicity that can make her seem like magnetic north on the compass. In these passages Ratmansky is hearing newborn love, with its implicit touch of elegy?for what if this love is lost??and he has choreographed to the high horizon line of Part?s arabesque, the atmospheric perch of her pointe, and the eloquence of her epaulement. The axis upon which these pas were created is not squarely presentational but canted, glancing, and this imparts an air of youth, freshness, and fullness. One can?t help feeling that the partnership here is more between Ratmansky and Part?both Russian, both raised on Tchaikovsky?than between Gomes and Part. Which is not to say that Gomes isn?t a perfect Prince. Part and Gomes were the transcendent presents under this tree.
You know, I've been thrown out of bars for going on about Veronika's epaulement, but that's a small price to pay for standing up for what you believe along the waterfront.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/03/another-tree-grows-in-brooklyn.html
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