Erica Cornejo and Reyneris Reyes in Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux
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Each year, usually on the opening night of the season, the Paris Opera Ballet presents a grand défilé, in which, to the Marche from Berlioz’s Les Troyens, the entire company, from éleves (students) to étoiles (stars), comes forward in waves to the front of the stage while audience members cheer for their favorites. (I was there in 2004 and can attest that the factions can get pretty spirited.) It’s a mark of Mikko Nissinen’s ambitions for Boston Ballet that last night’s benefit Gala Performance at the Wang Theatre ended with such a défilé. The scale was smaller: Boston Ballet II and the Boston Ballet School did not participate, so there were only some 45 dancers on stage, not the endless reinforcements of Paris, where every étoile seemed to have his or her own battalion of students and corps members. The music — Henry Purcell — was also less grand, and the trumpet writing had the Boston Ballet Orchestra struggling for the first time all evening. And the choreography, by Nissinen and ballet mistress Trinidad Vives, was modest in an appropriate way for a company that knows where it wants to go and also knows it’s not there yet.
One might have questioned the wisdom of staging a gala in the middle of a production run (Don Quixote), but the Wang orchestra section was well filled, even with the front center seats going for $250. The 14 selections spanned the company’s repertoire of classical and modern: Balanchine (Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, excerpts from Apollo and Who Cares?), Jerome Robbins (Other Dances, Suite of Dances), party pieces (the Gopak from Rotislav Zakharov’s Taras Bulba, Fokine’s The Dying Swan), contemporary works by the company’s favored choreographers (the pas de deux from William Forsythe’s In the middle, somewhat elevated, the pas de deux from Val Caniparoli’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, an excerpt from Jorma Elo’s Carmen), an excerpt from a piece by second soloist Heather Myers (One Constant), an excerpt from a piece the company has never performed (Edward Stierle’s Lacrymosa), and two selections from Don Quixote. Six of the 14 have been performed by the company within the last six months; less would have been nice, but this was a fair portrait of Boston Ballet.
Nelson Madrigal and Larissa Ponomarenko in Don Quixote
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Nissinen did not put his best foot forward with the opening Who Cares? segment, “The Man I Love,” for which Lia Cirio lacked pelvis and Carlos Molina panache and there was labor in the lifts. Melanie Atkins put matters right in “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” all jittery, jazzy, and flouncy within the strict context of Mr. B’s weight transfers and Rockette kicks; Kathleen Breen Combes, substituting for Lorna Feijóo, had the right sensibility but could be a tad less floppy. Cirio’s energy seemed to be going down, not up; Molina’s energy needed less Fred and more Gene.
Karine Seneca and Pavel Gurevich were well matched in the Caniparoli excerpt, making Euro-virtues out of its Euro-clichés, bodies driven by urges only half understood, but there’s more to Bartók’s music than Caniparoli finds in it. Joel Prouty reprised his “Gopak” virtuoso turn from last May’s “Russian” program, then new principal Erica Cornejo and Reyneris Reyes did Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Cornejo detailed and distinctive, with delicacy in her entrechats and ronds de jambe and speed in her manège, Reyes a supportive partner but blurring his double tours. Jared Redick’s solo to the “Lacrymosa” from Mozart’s Requiem was a piece of studied melodrama, the orchestra’s no-nonsense tempo notwithstanding; it got the biggest applause of the night to that point.
Tina LeBlanc and Gonzalo Garcia in Apollo
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Two guests from San Francisco Ballet, Tina LeBlanc and Gonzalo Garcia, performed Other Dances. Garcia, already in town to partner Cornejo in Don Quixote, again showed an easy authority and technique in reserve; LeBlanc’s thoughtful understatements conveyed both the salon superficiality and the mystery of Chopin’s four mazurkas and one waltz. Freda Locker’s on-stage playing of the music was admirably forthright. The first half ended with the Carmen excerpt, a fireworks display from the lead men (Sabi Varga and Joel Prouty, the latter with another eye-popping revoltade) and women (Karine Seneca, Kathleen Breen Combes, Melissa Hough) and a reminder to the audience that dance is not all tulle and tutus.
The Don Q Fandango that followed intermission, with Tai Jiménez and Carlos Molina (substituting for Mindaugas Bauzys), was a little short on sizzle. Not so New York City Ballet principal Damian Woetzel in Jerome Robbins’s Suite of Dances, to movements from Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. More of a Huck Finn type than Mikhail Baryshnikov, for whom Robbins made the work in 1994, Woetzel exudes confidence, and, sporting red sweats, he seemed to be making it up as he went along. But as in Other Dances, Robbins’s choreographic inventiveness ran out before the music did, and the on-stage cello performance, by Wendy Sutter, at times languished. The excerpt from Heather Myers’s One Constant, for four men and four women, looked like a middling Jorma Elo knock-off, but perhaps this is a work-in-progress. In the abbreviated pas de deux from Don Q, Larissa Ponomarenko conveyed a sense of the occasion, articulate and aristocratic in a truly gala performance. With no solo variation, her Basilio, Nelson Madrigal, was solid throughout.
The défilé
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Thom Willems’s ear-popping electronic score for In the middle, somewhat elevated was a reminder to the audience that dance music is not all Tchaikovsky. Yury Yanowsky hinted at mean streets and paranoia; Romi Beppu was angular but insufficiently violent. Returning to do the Apollo-Terpsichore duet from Apollo, LeBlanc and Garcia were idiomatic and pleasing but didn’t erase this observer’s memory of the Apollo Boston Ballet staged in 1993. Lorna Feijóo finished it off with a reprise of her melting Dying Swan from last May. And then the défilé, which suffered from the absence of some injured principals and soloists (Roman Rykine, Mindaugas Bauzys, Misa Kuranaga) and even more from the weight the members of the school would have given it. Maybe next time.