★★★★✰ Marina Harss with thoughts/observations on La Valse, Other Dances, After the Rain pas de deux, Agon, Monumentum Pro Gesualdo, Movements for Piano and Orchestra and Chaconne.
Tag - Sterling Hyltin
★★★★✰ "Boy is it good to be in the presence of dancers and musicians again." concludes Marina Harss review of New York City Ballet’s fall season opening performance.
★★★★✰ George Balanchine's "Stravinsky Violin Concerto" has just been streamed by NYCB - Jann Parry on a complex and effervesent masterwork, if Balanchine stated that it was simply his response to Stravinsky’s music...
★★★✰✰ Robbins’ response to Chopin (in Dances at a Gathering) is also extraordinary: sensitive, simple, vulnerable, direct, un-fussy.
★★★★✰ It makes a noticeable difference when Litton, music director of the company, is in the pit; the orchestra has presence and sings, providing a convincing counterpart for the dancing.
★★★★✰ For Balanchine, Shakespeare’s characters are two-dimensional types, exemplary but wholly unreal. They are shadows in a shadow-play, representing this or that quality...
★★★★✰ There’s a reason why New York City Ballet doesn’t do George Balanchine’s Scotch Symphony very often. It’s a strangely disjointed ballet...
★★★✰✰ Opus 19 feels at once nostalgic, mysterious and dreamy...
★★★★✰ Nothing revives a repertory like new casting. So we can be grateful to the interim leadership at New York City Ballet for reconsidering who gets to dance some of the company’s most elemental repertory: Agon, Apollo, Serenade.
★★★★✰ There has been a generational shift at New York City Ballet, that much was clear last night in a program of Stravinsky ballets that included two major débuts and several smaller ones...
★★★★✰ It was a good night for Afternoon of a Faun, in particular. Chase Finlay, débuting in the role of the young dancer sensually lolling about a ballet studio, brought back the eroticism this ballet often lacks.
★★★✰✰ One of Robbins’ great talents was sniffing out the style of his time, but this inevitably places a date stamp on his work.
★★★★✰ The oldest piece on the program is Wheeldon’s Polyphonia. Made in 2001, it has stood the test of time. Just last week it was performed at the Fall for Dance festival...
★★★★★ Alexei Ratmansky’s Odessa left me breathless. The dancing (I saw both casts) was phenomenal on all levels: assured, expressive, and thoroughly dramatic.
★★★✰✰ With only four works, no intermissions and a run time of less than two hours, New York City Ballet’s Spring Gala was short and to the point.
★★★✰✰ It’s a shame that the company didn’t choose to revive some Wheeldon rarities from its back catalogue...
★★★✰✰ More than anything, Peck's "The Times are Racing" reminded me of the movie Rebel Without a Cause. These kids are uneasy, but what is the object of their unease?
★★★✰✰ Alongside George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, one could argue that the third most important voice at New York City Ballet in the twentieth century was that of Igor Stravinsky.
★★★★✰ Sara Mearns, who made her name as Swan Queen at the age of nineteen, is still the most thrilling Odette around.
★★★★✰ Divertimento’s aura still shines; you want to see it again, to figure out its fluid, almost magical transitions. It’s a shame it will only be performed four times this season; it takes more than that for the audience, and the dancers, to really get to know it.