The Phoenix Network:
 
 
About  |  Advertise
Adult  |  Moonsigns  |  Band Guide  |  Blogs  |  In Pictures
 
Books  |  Comedy  |  Dance  |  Museum And Gallery  |  Theater
Nominate-best-2010

Crowning glory

Boston Ballet's Jewels at the Wang Theatre.
By JEFFREY GANTZ  |  March 4, 2009

090306_jewels_main1
RUBIES: Kathleen Breen Combes was too much for her hunters in the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors section; she also impressed Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times.

In 1967, George Balanchine created Jewels for New York City Ballet, and in short order this evening-length triptych — Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds — became the crown jewel of 20th-century dance, three ballets that add up to one, glitter that’s also gold, a “plotless” work that’s really a bottomless well of stories. Boston Ballet has staged Rubies on four previous occasions, but never Emeralds or Diamonds. Now it’s finally offering a complete Jewels (at the Wang Theatre through March 8), and if Emeralds is so far a little pale, Rubies and Diamonds confirm the company’s international stature, the latter crowned by three laceratingly intimate performances from Kathleen Breen Combes and Yury Yanowsky. Here’s how the first weekend shook out.

Slideshow: Boston Ballet's Jewels

More Jewels. By Jeffrey Gantz.

EMERALDS | Its eight parts set to Gabriel Fauré’s incidental music for Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Edmond de Haraucourt’s Shylock, Emeralds is Paris and France. Its elements are earth and water; its backdrop is hunter green with a champagne-curtain frame; its mood is dreamy, almost somnambulistic. Found in a forest, Maeterlinck’s Mélisande is a mystery woman who loses her crown in a well and her wedding ring in a fountain — in other words, she’s half woman and half water fairy. (In another Maeterlinck play, Mélisande is one of Bluebeard’s escaped wives — Balanchine had fewer wives than Bluebeard, but not by many.) Emeralds’ solo for the first lady is music Fauré wrote for Mélisande at the spinning wheel (spinning straw into gold?); the Sicilienne for the second ballerina represents the scene where Mélisande loses her wedding ring; the second couple’s “clock” movements in the “step” nocturne duet (an kind of unmarked polonaise) suggest that time has come to the forest. Up to that point it’s been the forest before the Fall, but then predators arrive in Paradise, in the form of Fauré’s hunting horns — Man, or Love, or both.

In 1967, there were just six sections to Emeralds; in 1976, after Suzanne Farrell had left NYCB and then returned, Balanchine added the “Epithalamion” from Shylock and, as the final section, Fauré’s music for the death of Mélisande. The 10-woman corps disperses; the two lead couples and the pas de trois man and two women process in funereal majesty. The lead men exchange partners; then the pas de trois ladies run out at the back, and the lead women follow them. The three men go to one knee and extend their right hands — only they’re facing opposite to the direction the ladies exited. Women (Farrell) one way, the Eternal Feminine the other.

The first woman has to be liquid (Balanchine set this part on Violette Verdy), and Larissa Ponomarenko, with an attentive Nelson Madrigal as her partner, was. Opening night, Yury Yanowsky and Lorna Feijóo looked ill-matched and ill at ease; partnered with Madrigal on Sunday, Feijóo caught the flow of the music better. Dancing with Carlos Molina Thursday and Lorin Mathis Sunday, Erica Cornejo was rapturous in the Mimi Paul second-lady role. The Boston Ballet Orchestra under Jonathan McPhee made palpable the contrast between oboes and horns, hunted and hunter, women and men.

1  |  2  |  3  |   next >
Related: State of the art, Smaller is better, The real deal, More more >
  Topics: Dance , Entertainment, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Edward Villella,  More more >
  • Share:
  • Share this entry with Facebook
  • Share this entry with Digg
  • Share this entry with Delicious
  • RSS feed
  • Email this article to a friend
  • Print this article
HTML Prohibited
Add Comment

Today's Event Picks
ARTICLES BY JEFFREY GANTZ
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   PLAY BY PLAY: FEBRUARY 5, 2010  |  February 03, 2010
    Boston's weekly theater listings
  •   PLAY BY PLAY: JANUARY 29, 2010  |  January 27, 2010
    Boston's weekly theater schedule
  •   PLAY BY PLAY: JANUARY 22, 2010  |  January 20, 2010
    Boston's weekly theatre schedule
  •   REVIEW: EMANUEL AX AT JORDAN HALL  |  January 13, 2010
    I don't want to imply that everybody who's anybody was at Jordan Hall Friday night to hear pianist Emanuel Ax's Celebrity Series recital — but that was Yo-Yo Ma sitting two rows in front of me.
  •   MISS PERFECT  |  January 12, 2010
    I know what you're thinking: " Another Emma ? Didn't we just have a bushel of Jane Austen adaptations for TV?" Well, WGBH did give us four new Austens, but that was all the way back in 2008, a Jane-ite eternity.

 See all articles by: JEFFREY GANTZ

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed 



  |  Sign In  |  Register
 
thePhoenix.com:
Phoenix Media/Communications Group:
TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
Copyright © 2010 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group