living legacies
about today’s performance “These two, more than anyone else in the 20th century, extended classicism in ballet. What’s classicism in ballet? Dancing that pursues pure form, in which the human body, in terms of line, shape, and volume, becomes a sculptural work of ideal geometry, and connects to the structures of music: music’s rhythm, music’s melody, and music’s harmony, even its sonority. (…) Balanchine is the choreographer who gets under our skin. He opens us up, and shows us our capacity for transcendence. Ashton is our skin. He’s the dance poet of our nervous system and of this world”, is how dance critic Alastair Macaulay describes the two pioneering choreographers – George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton – whose works remain “state of the art” and are now brought together in the Vienna State Ballet’s Living Legacies. While Balanchine’s Mozart ballet Divertimento No. 15 is one of his airiest creations and beautifully evokes the spirit of the divertissement, Ashton’s Rhapsody is a timeless masterpiece from the British choreographer’s many-sided oeuvre: one of his last works, combining brilliant virtuosity with poetic lyricism. Living Legacies takes us up to the present with Christopher Wheeldon in the middle section of the triple bill, making the continuities and discontinuities clear. With Within the Golden Hour, Wheeldon, who grew up with Ashton’s choreographic signature as a dancer with the Royal Ballet and then followed in Balanchine’s footsteps as a soloist and resident choreographer at New York City Ballet, presents a choreography of fleeting beauty and shimmering sensuality: “Ashton’s musicality, the line of the upper body, the finesse of the petit allégro, his unironic tenderness… all these qualities fed into Within the Golden Hour”, Wheeldon says, and once again demonstrates how maintaining choreographic traditions and rethinking the art of dance anchors classical ballet in the here and now and keeps it alive.
ABOUT TODAY’S PERFORMANCE
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Natalya Butchko in Divertimento No. 15
← Sinthia Liz & Victor Caixeta in Within the Golden Hour
Cassandra Trenary & António Casalinho in Rhapsody
elegance & verve NASTASJA FISCHER
The compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart have been a great source of creativity and inspiration to choreographers for a very long time, and George Balanchine was one of those inspired by the clarity, elegance and complexity of Mozart’s oeuvre, creating an homage to the great composer with his Divertimento No. 15. However, the ballet remained one of his few Mozart choreographies and the only one still alive in the repertoire today. His respect for the Austrian “wunderkind” was just too great. “We found we could remember very little of the original. So many new ballets had intervened that I had to start work all over again! That was not altogether a misfortune, for this score is one I admire most in the world,” Balanchine wrote in 1956 about the beginning of the rehearsal process where he tried to revive Caracole, his choreography from four years earlier, for the Mozart Festival at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. The work had been created to the Divertimento No. 15 in B-flat major KV 287, which Balanchine describes as the “greatest divertimento ever written.” For his second setting of the divertimento the choreographer did make use of some movement material from Caracole, but he named the work after its music. To match its chamber music score, it was danced by a small cast of eight soloists and eight ladies from the corps de ballet. The ensemble was led by stars of the New York City Ballet and Balanchine’s great ballerinas such as Patricia Wilde and his wife Tanaquil LeClerq, who, in the same year as the world premiere, contracted a severe case of polio while on a European tour and was forced to abandon her promising career. Mozart’s composition was written in the year 1777, at a point in time when the divertimento as a genre was at its peak and hugely popular at courts across Europe. It was written for the name day on 13 June of the Countess Maria Antonia Lodron from Salzburg. The wealthy Lodrons had not only been one of the noblest aristocratic houses dating back to the 17th century, they were also friends of the Mozart family, so Maria Antonia had already had the pleasure of receiving the Divertimento in F major KV 247 the year before. While Mozart titled the pair of compositions Two Cassations for the Countess, his father Leopold referred to them in correspondence as Lodron Night Music.
ELEGANCE & VERVE
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“Among the purest, most cheerful, joyous and complete things to ever take on musical form,” is how musicologist Alfred Einstein rated both divertimenti. Divertimento No. 15 had its premiere performance at an open-air Lodron family gathering and the music of the work also has an unmistakably summery and festive character. In his choice of instruments and a structure made up of six movements, Mozart adheres entirely to the divertimento tradition, composing an Allegro, Andante grazioso, Minuet, Adagio, Minuet and Andante – Allegro molto in a manner that is richly varied, dance-like and extremely skilful. What stands out in particular is his virtuosic writing for the first violin, that has a solo or concerto feel, and which Mozart himself played at a concert in Munich in 1777: “All the greats were scowling. I played as if I was the greatest violinist in the whole of Europe.” For his choreography to Divertimento No. 15 Balanchine cut the second minuet and the andante of the sixth movement, while commissioning the British conductor and arranger John Colman to expand the cadenza for violin and viola. “In Balanchine’s setting of Mozart’s music, one senses that two great minds were truly ‘kindred spirits’,” the ballet critic Richard Buckle wrote, pointing out the precision of Balanchine’s choreographic analysis of the music in which the movements follow the musical themes absolutely, putting into practice his philosophy of “See the music, hear the dance.” While the whole ensemble is only seen together on stage in the preparatory first and vivid last movement, in the central section a range of couples and groups emerge, dancing at times in duets and trios. These “number games” enable Balanchine to present symmetry and proportion, imagining Mozart’s clear, balanced and formal music in visual terms. These geometrically precise movement patterns also highlight Balanchine’s particular way of using space, in which the architecture of choreography and the body is written into the stage space. In a series of solo variations, that “sparkle on stage like diamonds,” the principal dancers are not only able to show off their technical ability, but also their personalities: “This ballet showcases its dancers, highlighting their technique, musicality, and the pure joy of dance,” the San Francisco Ballet emphasises in its programme notes. While above all the choreography reveals a great tenderness and delicate sensibility in its movements, reviving the elegance of Mozart’s spirit in the most sublime way, Divertimento No. 15 is also an excellent example of Balanchine’s choreographic language. The individual sequences of movement have strength and verve, offering jumps, rapid pirouettes and uplifting arabesques: “The music is like crystal and the dance is the same,” in the words of Elyse Borne, who has staged Divertimento No. 15 in many places. In the original stage design, a white trellis reinforced the impression of a private garden party and the airy, free character of the divertimento. Now the “tutu” ballet in costumes designed by Karinska is danced on an empty stage with a blue background, so that the decor too directs its focus on the dance and how it connects with the space and music. Divertimento No. 15 is not only an elegant summery Mozart ballet, but also a brilliant example of Balanchine’s neoclassical repertoire, a pure ballet distinguished by its great beauty, precise spatial and choreographic patterns and remarkable musicality. 11
ELEGANCE & VERVE
Davide Dato
Natalya Butchko & Masayu Kimoto
Ensemble
a century of choreographic inspiration ANNA BEKE
A hundred years have passed since Ninette de Valois founded the Academy of Choreographic Art, now the Royal Ballet School, in 1926, thereby laying one of the foundation stones of British ballet – and Frederick Ashton (1904-1988), one of the leading creative forces in 20th century dance, made his debut as a choreographer with A Tragedy of Fashion. Two milestones in the history of English ballet. Ashton’s career in particular appears in retrospect to resemble a multilayered panorama of ballet history between the last offshoots of Tsarist classicism and post-war modernism. There is hardly any leading figure of the period whom he did not meet: from the prima ballerinas of the Ballets Russes Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina through Bronislava Nijinska, Léonide Massine and George Balanchine and on to the pioneers of English ballet Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois as well as the subsequent international ambassadors of the Royal Ballet, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. Together with de Valois – the grande dame of English ballet – Sir Frederick Ashton shaped a young and at first barely established company into the Royal Ballet that would become one of the world’s leading classical ensembles. He gave English ballet an aesthetic identity, elevated it into a national art form and created works with an unmistakably British style that continue to form part of the core repertoire of major international companies to this day.
A CENTURY OF CHOREOGRAPHIC INSPIRATION
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Indeed, Ashton achieved something similar for the popularity of ballet in England to what his counterpart George Balanchine did for the United States: while the latter took (neo-)classicism in the direction of thoroughly abstract dance architecture, Ashton’s ballet retained a poetic, humanistic and psychologically aware dimension – even his non-narrative ballets are permeated with intense atmospheres and emotional resonances. At the same time his artistic dance bursts with local colouring; it is characterised by elegance, a finely chiselled musicality, understatement and a keen sense of humour. Ashton’s dance creations combine the flawless classic technique of danse d’école with a poetic movement quality, yet they never seem demonstratively spectacular, instead they are reticently polite: “very British” indeed. Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton was born on 17 September 1904 in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and spent his childhood largely in Peru. He experienced the decisive spark for his artistic career as a thirteen-year-old in 1917 in Lima, when – far away from the centres of European culture – he attended a performance by Anna Pavlova as part of a South American tour. This experience had a profound effect on him and hardened an irrevocable decision inside him to become a dancer. After continuing his schooling in England, Ashton worked for an export firm and despite considerable resistance from his bourgeois family began ballet training with Léonide Massine and Marie Rambert. Rambert in particular immediately recognised his creative talent and encouraged Ashton to devise his own pieces. In 1928 Ashton joined Ida Rubinstein’s dance troupe in Paris – an experience that would become an important apprenticeship for the young choreographer. He was particularly fascinated by Nijinska’s architectonic clarity and her fluid handling of the upper body: “While I was with Rubinstein I didn’t take my eyes off her for a moment.” Everything he ever learned came from her. In 1935 de Valois recruited Ashton as a dancer and choreographer for the Vic-Wells Ballet, the forerunner of the Royal Ballet – this engagement would become the crucial turning point in his life and the company his artistic home and constant for almost five decades. When Ashton started choreographing, a distinctly British ballet did not yet exist: England possessed neither the tradition of Russia nor the established institutions of France, Italy or Denmark; its significant impulses came from elsewhere. Ashton, full of curiosity about the artistic and social worlds around him, absorbed the widest possible range of influences: memories of his own childhood in South America, jazz elements from London’s entertainment scene, English popular culture and the recurrent spiritual aura of the Ballets Russes. American film star Fred Astaire with his unique combination of charm, glamour and wit was also one of Ashton’s supreme idols – and one of the few male ones. However, Ashton’s artistry lay not in imitating these manifold impressions, but in transforming them into a choreographic language unmistakably his own; a signature that would soon become virtually synonymous with the English ballet style: its characteristics were a cultivated finesse, the sublime elegance of its lines and mime so eloquent it practically spoke to the audience; to this were added gently flowing upper body movements, a complex play of the arms and shoulders and extremely fast, deli 31
A CENTURY OF CHOREOGRAPHIC INSPIRATION