Archangel of the arts?

Many ballet dancers, writes Jennifer Homans, 'are suspicious of words, and understandably so: they spend their lives working with their bodies and with music, and words are simply not their trade'. All the more impressive, then, that two former dancers write so beautifully about their art. The first lady remains Royal Ballet trained Julie Kavanagh, with her compelling and superbly researched biographies of Ashton and Nureyev. Now Homans, who started out at the School of American Ballet, ticks many of the literary boxes with an ambitious popular history of the art, Apollo's Angels.

She has enlightened me about so many aspects of ballet that I'd barely given a thought: the intellectual rigour with its roots in the classical belief of human perfectability through the body's geometric proportions, the striving to reach the heavens and 'the great Ballet-master' (as the Abbé Mersenne called 'the author of the universe' in 1636). Later the Jesuits taught the 'mute rhetoric' of dance, gesture and declamation. But it was at the court of Louis XIV, of course, that ballet reached its first, painstakingly stratified plateau. Like his predecessor but with far greater discipline and devotion, the future roi soleil devoted himself to the art and appeared in some 40 ballets. There's no escaping the celebrated image of Louis as Apollo in Le Ballet de la Nuit, with suns great and small all over his costume (I fear this image is back to front, but as it's wikifree, it'll have to do).

Just how lively the court ballets could be we heard on Friday night in an orchestrally and chorally superb performance of Phaëton, Lully's 1684 tragédie lyrique, zestily conducted and played at the harpsichord by that great animateur Christophe Rousset: there's a chaconne to conclude the second act which you feel could go on for ever. Homans tells us how the gravitas of Louis's beloved Courante gave way to the toujours gai Minuet preferred by Lully. Around 1800 we get the waltz, but that's to jump over the Enlightenment development of story-ballets and the French Revolution.

Homans is brilliant, at first anyway, in connecting the art to the times. There's a chapter on the democratisation of dance with the advent of the Revolution. Its later artistic celebrations with women in white as paragons of reason and virtue were a far cry from the scabrous Carmagnole caricatured here in Fred Barnard's Victorian illustration for Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.

There are portraits where Homans goes straight to the anecdotal heart of the matter: of Marie Sallé hitting London in the 1730s, according to one witness 'without hoopskirts , or corps, dishevelled and with no ornaments in her hair...just draped in chiffons on the model of a Greek statue'; and of Marie Taglioni, no beauty, using rigorous self-discipline to steer the dance away from male domination in the 1800s with her embodiment of sylphdom and Gautier's romantic maxim that 'ballets are the dreams of poets taken seriously'. Here's her Sylphide appearing to Scots dreamer James in the French ballet that Bournonville was to immortalise in Denmark with his own special style (it still has a conservative hold, in the best sense, on ballet in that country today).

Diligent in her coverage of how ballet advanced, or not, in other countries through the 19th century, Homans gives us fascinating insight into the proto-Fascist pageants of Luigi Manzotti in Italy: the hugely popular Excelsior (1881), an allegory of Progress, 'boasted a cast of more than five hundred, including twelve horses, two cows and an elephant'.

In Homans's Russian chapters, we are back on the serious tack. The imperial bolstering wasn't news to me, but I hadn't appreciated quite how much Tchaikovsky's later scores 'brought out a whole new range and tone-colour in the human body, a nuance and subtlety that Minkus and Pugni could never inspire'. All this, in The Sleeping Beauty, in spite of the essentially court-dictated spectacle of it all (photo from original 1890 production).

As Homans moves into the 20th Century, she is less ready to take the rough with the smooth, the earthy with the idealistic. On the plus side, there's a pitch-perfect journey through the highs and lows of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with a special pleading for Nijinsky both as dancer, bringing a 'fragrant androgyny' to redefine male dancing 'and put the danseur back at the centre of ballet' (below, in Le Dieu Bleu)

and as choreographer; Le Sacre du Printemps was 'a bleak and intense celebration of the collective will...a coldly rational depiction of a primitive and irrationally charged world...the first truly modern ballet' (Roerich's costume design for the Chosen One below).

Can you believe Le Sacre only had eight performances before being lost to the world? In her epilogue, Homans excoriates Millicent Hodson's 'reconstruction' as 'a travesty' rendering 'a radical and shocking dance...tame and kitschy'. How she could be so sure about the original I don't know, but 'kitschy' was certainly my experience of a recent Maryinsky performance.

Also on the plus side is Homans's delightful potted history of Ashton's progress, growing out of the surprising intellectual beginnings of British ballet proper in the 1920s - Ninette de Valois's Rout, for instance, kicked off with a dancer reciting a poem by German political activist Ernst Toller - and experiencing a miraculous sweet renaissance against the spirit of angrier times with  La Fille mal gardée in 1960. On the minus side is her disapproval of Kenneth MacMillan's later plunge 'into the depths of his own damaged personality and dark obsessions'. Shattering Mayerling, for instance, is dismissed with implied disapproval in a sentence (pictured, Johan Persson's image of Mara Galeazzi with the astounding Edward Watson in a recent Royal Ballet revival) .

The same problem arises with the chapter on Soviet ballet from Stalin to Brezhnev. Homans is excellent on the communist reinvention of the classics, but when she comes to the 1960s, she is more concerned to be down on the 'tasteless and bombastic' aspects of Grigorovitch's Spartacus than to give credit to its colossal energy, still wowing us in the latest personification of Russian masculinity, Ivan Vasiliev (photo by Damir Yusupov for the Bolshoi Ballet, originally included in the Arts Desk review to which I've linked).

Homans rises to the challenge of surveying three great American-based careers: those of the violence-prone Anthony Tudor, of whom I knew little, of Jerome Robbins and above all of the great archangel George Balanchine: such a career that was, from his first great choreography of Stravinsky's music, Apollo, in 1927 - you might see why he changed the look of it in later years -

 to the dying man's 1981 vision of the Adagio lamentoso in Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony.  Detailed reflection on Agon (1957), with Stravinsky's musical time-machine whizzing us from the court dances of Louis XIV through to the dodecaphonic era, returns us full circle to the intellectual beginnings of ballet.

Then the epilogue has to go and spoil it all. Sure, there have been no giants like Balanchine since his death. But nor has ballet itself snuffed it, as Homans implies. What, not a word of today's choreographers, like Ratmansky revitalising the Russian tradition or our British-based live wires, like the pair who have so enchanted my hard-to-please colleague Ismene Brown in her review yesterday of the Ballet Boyz? Homans also has not a word to say about recent hybrids which, it's true, have an eye on the market (why shouldn't they?) but keep their integrity, like the companies of Alvin Ailey (his troupe's phenomenal Samuel Lee Roberts pictured by Paul Kolnik) and Matthew Bourne?

It seems to me that Homans's anxiety to keep her ballet chronicle tied to a cultural history, which is frequently a strength, leads her to see black and white patterns where the truth is somewhere in the middle. Still, hers is a gripping, readable study, which everyone with the slightest interest in ballet should read.

I've been slow to catch up on writing about other reading here. January and February saw a pleasurable return to Iceland. First was Halldór Laxness's typically skewed wit and (I suspect very native) sense of fantasy in The Fish Can Sing, a tale of growing up and falling under the spell of a 'world singer' - or not - in the developing days of Reykjavík's history. Who could fail to be enchanted by this?

It's neither as long nor as sombre as Independent People, which is of course a more epic kind of masterpiece, and infinitely more readable than World Light, which I had to give up on. No readability problems, though, with the thrillers of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Since being engrossed by My Soul to Take - covered in that same blog entry where I referenced Laxness for the first time - after falling under the spell of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, I'd been longing to catch up on her three others to date. I began this time with Ashes to Dust, a magnificent - and educational - mix of the gruesomely personal with the volcanic eruption on Heimaey, the largest of the Westmann Islands, back in 1973 (slightly grainy picture from that time below).

The result of which is, of course, I'm itching to visit the island. Just as evocative in its sense of place is the latest thriller, The Day is Dark, with its baleful evocation of an isolated part of Greenland and its people.  Then I went back to the first of Sigurðardóttir's books, Last Rituals, set mostly in the capital but with a creepy investigation into witchcraft on Iceland.

Indeed, you learn a lot about the country. But the best thing about these books is the disparity between the utterly down to earth, likeable and only mildly dysfunctional protagonist, attorney Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, and the bizarre and often stomach-churning cases with which she's involved. There's plenty of mileage in the character yet, so I look forward to more.

Beauty by the book

With apologies to the balletophobes, it’s Aurora time again. And on this occasion I don’t disagree with anything in the Arts Desk review by my eloquent colleague Ismene Brown, who took me along to the English National Ballet Sleeping Beauty (photos - only four to choose from, sadly, which is why you'll see them so often - by Patrick Baldwin for ENB). Perhaps, with infinitely less knowledge of the steps and technical difficulties involved, I have more than just one reservation about ace ballerina and ENB artistic director Tamara Rojo’s Princess, pictured above with Vadim Muntagirov. 

It’s not just that she goes to the altar untransfigured by love, but that there’s not a hint of girlishness about her 16-year-old in Act One. She tackles the absurd number of early challenges with aplomb, but the face is mask-like, except for when the mouth opens and closes in preparation for a hair-raising sequence. Which only, for me, highlights the narrative brilliance of Matthew Bourne in making Aurora a bit – Ismene thinks way too much – of a wild child.

But otherwise the shows are not really comparable: one is a consistent piece of novel storytelling, a dance-panto, whereas this lavish recreation of Kenneth MacMillan’s Petipa-faithful homage for the American Ballet Theatre preserves the aristocratic tradition without quite pickling it in aspic.

You’ve got to do it at the highest level, though, and ENB can. The Nicholas Georgiadis costumes are a wonder; as Ismene points out, they are as lavishly detailed for minor figures like the nurses, the Puritan spinning women and the haughty, stylishly hatted ladies of the Prince's court as they are for the individual fairies and regal mortals. Peter Farmer’s old-fashioned leafy painted flats are a bit minimal by comparison, but provide a pretty framework. You also need to be able to cast the character variations from strength, too, and this was for me the most amazing aspect of the production. 

The highlight, perhaps, is the Prologue’s Pas de Six. What extraordinary patterns Petipa demands from the 6x6x6 combinations of fairies, cavaliers and lilac entourage, and how perfectly that's realised here. What character there was in Nancy Osbaldeston’s finger-pointing Golden Vine and Shiori Kase’s sweetest of songbirds.

Maybe Kase’s smile is in default mode, but she used it to equally winning effect as Princess Florine in Act Three, partnered by the muscular but agile-legged Yonah (nephew of Carlos) Acosta, confirming the promise we’d already enjoyed in Le jeune homme et la mort. Osbaldeston shone again as Red Riding Hood, and lest we thought the royal couple’s thunder might be stolen, Muntagirov's immensely likeable Prince used his tall personage to peerless advantage in his tarantella. Rojo does aristocratic best, and was fine as a glacial Vision Aurora in Act Two. It would be hard to find better personifications of Good versus Evil than Daria Klimentová’s imperturbable Lilac Fairy and James Streeter’s Carabosse, memorably dressed as a wraith Queen Elizabeth who gestures stylishly enough to avoid toppling over into camp.

Of course I’m going to moan a bit about the cuts in Tchaikovsky's greatest score, more within numbers – often musically illogical – than with respect to the usual casualties. There, though, we could have had 20 minutes' more music rather than an unnecessary interval between Prologue and Act One. But how good to have an excellent live orchestra with such first-rate wind soloists (Gareth Hulse a real luxury in the best Grand Pas oboe solo you’ll ever hear).

I always wonder who dictates the tempi, conductor or dancers; two of the Prologue variations as well as Aurora’s in Act Three feel way too slow. There were a few smudgy ensembles but overall Gavin Sutherland led a confident performance. No doubt about it, though, this is the highest-level Gesamtkunstwerk Beauty on show. The regions who’ve already seen it must have wondered what hit them (Oxford and Southampton have yet to benefit). And you may well get a different Aurora and Prince, who should be as good if not better. But don’t be too timid to try out the Bourne Beauty too.

Lisztomania

Or rather, mania with Liszt attached. I wasn't expecting to be quite so stunned by the new DVD of Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling; having seen Edward Watson as a rather pallid Romeo, I'd never imagined he'd be up to the mark of syphilitic, gun-toting, sado-masochistic Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (not telling you the true-to-life plot if you don't already know it). But that's the intriguing thing about dancers, as with singers, that some roles just fit them like a glove. I wish I'd understood this earlier in life.

Clearly 35 words on it in a BBC Music Magazine ballet round-up wasn't going to be enough, so I was lucky to have a chance, simultaneously, to write about Liszt and the use of his music in the ballet by John Lanchbery for the Royal Opera and Ballet website, readable here. I think the site looks good now as well as, let's hope, reading informatively and being well cross-referenced).

That fellow Jack, as Lanchbery's pals knew him, really was more of a great man than most people seem to have recognised. I adore his work on Tales of Beatrix Potter - which he came to the flat to talk about shortly before he died, tinkling away on the ivories of our on-loan Steinway Boudoir Grand to demonstrate - and La fille mal gardee. The Liszt potpourri is perhaps even more sensitive a selection. There are works already scored by Liszt, who God knows was not on the whole the greatest orchestrator, including the opening of A Faust Symphony which serves as brooding deathmotif throughout; but Lanchbery also does a pointedly weird job himself on some of the quirkier piano miniatures. Anyway, read all about it over there.


As for the latest cast to take up MacMillan's grim gauntlet, what an ensemble it is. All the ladies create a real sense of character - not just the scary-ambitious Mary Vetsera of Mara Galeazzi (pictured with Watson above in the first of two Royal Ballet production photos by Johan Persson, in a Pas so physical you fear her body might snap) and Sarah Lamb's calculating Marie Larisch but also the poignant ones, Iohna Loots as poor Princess Stephanie (dancing another weird Pas de deux with Watson's Rudolf below) and Cindy Jourdain's hot-and-cold Empress Mother. There's a dazzling, sexy cameo from Steven McRae, too, as royal cabbie Bratfisch. Otherwise the whole thing works against what I always thought the principle of ballet was, to froth up, instead stripping down to the skull beneath the skin. Very scary. I can't wait for it to come back into the Royal Ballet rep.


And of course it's the Liszt bicentenary, as if you could possibly have missed that already, as well as Hungary's controversial six-month EU presidency (it looks as if Sarkozy and Merkel may already have plied a restraining effect upon Hungary's truly awful new government). I have no regrets about missing the wonderful Budapest Festival Orchestra under Ivan Fischer on Sunday, simply because while no doubt that was a five-star occasion - my pal Ed Seckerson certainly loved it, and so did the diplo-mate - the duo of towering violinist Leonidas Kavakos and revelatory pianist Enrico Pace over at the Wigmore would have to merit five and a half. More anxious to hear a masterpiece not often played live, Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata, in such hands rather than the relatively known quantities on the BFO programme, I chose to write about the recital for The Arts Desk; I'm still reeling from it and thinking over especially the plains of heaven Kavakos and Pace trod in Schubert's C major Fantasy.

Anyway, there's plenty more Liszt on the horizon (all they had on offer at the Southbank was the First Piano Concerto, another dubious choice for Stephen Hough, but Fischer had already done several of the not-great tone poems as well as anyone could expect at the Barbican several years back). Mayerling has sent me back to some of the sources, not least the Harmonies du soir of the transcendental etudes which serves as a climactic Act 3 Pas de Deux. Bertrand in Paris was going through a Cziffra craze, some of which rubbed off on me, so here's the phenomenal Hungarian master surmounting a peak of pianistic art:



Before we go on to more Cziffra, a less overheated interlude - one of the many great works which wouldn't have fitted into the decadent, hothouse environment of Mayerling, Les jeux d'eaux a la Villa d'Este. This performance was recorded in 1928 by my personal favourite among Liszt interpreters, Claudio Arrau.



Cziffra leads me on to the opera we're spending seven or so weeks on at the City Lit, Wagner's Tannhauser. We're already having an intriguing time in the two Venusbergs of 1845 and 1861, so here's the Liszt transcription of the Overture from Tannhauser's second hymn of praise to Venus to the end:



And just as an ironic encore, since there's been so much talk of this since we discussed it at Susie and Michael's on 2 January, another overture transcription with a difference: Hindemith's Overture to The Flying Dutchman as Played at Sight by a Second-Rate Spa Orchestra at the Village Well at 7 O'Clock in the Morning.
A little of it goes a long way until it breaks out in a Strauss waltz, but what effects from a mere string quartet.