★★★★✰ I had missed SFB’s London season at Sadler’s Wells in 2019, so was pleased to catch up with ballets brought together for this digital triple bill.
Tag - Mungunchimeg Buriad
★★★✰✰ The choreography in Shostakovich Trilogy, which was co-commissioned by SFB and ABT and premiered in 2014, is as frustratingly capricious as the music.
★★✰✰✰ The trouble with Program 2 is its centerpiece, choreographer-in-residence Yuri Possokhov’s new work 'Optimistic Tragedy'.
★★★★✰ The company’s first regular-season commission from Czech choreographer Jiří Bubeníček, "Fragile Vessels", is a 40-minute meditation on love, loss and reconciliation.
★★★★✰ San Francisco Ballet (SFB) saved the best for its last mixed bill of the 2016 season.
Program 3 features Hans van Manen's Variations for Two Couples, William Forsythe's The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, Manifesto by Myles Thatcher and “The Kingdom of the Shades” from La Bayadère.
Closing the program is Kurt Jooss’s anti-war ballet from 1932,The Green Table, one of the greatest pieces of choreography ever created and still relevant after more than 80 years.