by Leigh Witchel
Things get shaved down for various reasons. When New York City Ballet put on a Viennese program, it was usually the triple bill of “Divertimento No. 15,” “Episodes” and “Vienna Waltzes.” This season, most likely because “Divert” was on another program, it was just the last two.
It was still a substantial program, but “Episodes” has also endured its own cuts. Its companion work, by Martha Graham on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, stopped being performed in tandem with Balanchine’s abstract work by 1960. The solo that Balanchine made for Paul Taylor was no longer done by 1961. But there’s still plenty to see in a journey through the Webern.
In the first movement, Webern took the structure of a symphony and x-rayed it to expose the bones fluorescing underneath the flesh. Balanchine did the same with a court dance, placing four couples onstage in the basic practice outfit that had become his uniform for modernism: tights and leotards, black and white. Four couples, each duo holding hands and drawn up formally in preparation to dance. One couple led; behind it three others echoed their moves, sometimes in unison, sometimes in canon. When the imitation was exact and when it was fractured kept us watching.
Megan LeCrone and Andrew Veyette led with slow, weighted walks. LeCrone is oblique and unorthodox, which makes her a natural in leotard ballets to add spice to the formality. At one point, she kicked her flexed foot above her head like Coppélia or another doll. Veyette is usually less formal. Here, he played it clean and cool, but his tough edges also made for an interesting contrast.
Preston Chamblee made a debut in the second section with Emily Kikta, but the “Five Pieces” did not fit. It was the timing. In the first piece Chamblee moved past Kikta too quickly as she was hunched over. There was no surprise when she was suddenly freestanding, like an umbrella stand or magazine rack next to an armchair. The same thing happened when he turned her upside down as if her legs became his antlers. Balanchine didn’t like it when people took “Five Pieces” as a joke, but nervous laughter is a better response to its cryptic goings-on than dead silence.
Where in the “Symphony,” the man partners the woman, in the “Concerto,” he stays behind and echoes her. Even though he stays discreetly at the rear of the stage, sometimes he’s the one initiating the phrase. Harrison Ball and Unity Phelan gave a cool, elegant performance. Their coolness worked; there was more concentration. Timing matters here but so does focus. The last movement of the “Concerto” is one of Balanchine’s chains – he was recycling bits of “The Four Temperaments. How the man deals with the four corps women, stepping into their linked hands, is very similar to “Phlegmatic.”
In the “Ricercata in six voices from Bach’s ‘Musical Offering,’” Sara Mearns gave a toned down, restrained performance. At least if you’re grading on a curve. Her solo looked about 50% Balanchine, 50% Mearns, most likely more feeling a need to fill a vacuum than changing it to suit herself. Still, the structure Balanchine builds at the end of this most ambivalent ballet takes Webern’s atonal armatures and finishes them off with a cathedral built to honor Bach.
In 1959, Balanchine was sharing the stage with Graham and working with Paul Taylor, but he had made “Agon” less than two years before. He had a legitimate claim to being in the vanguard on his own turf. Balanchine’s innovations weren’t in the vocabulary of “Episodes.” He had been using similar steps to indicate a modern versus classical palette since his time with Diaghilev. Rather than changing the steps, he put them in new situations, and as he put it, new combinations.
Perhaps because it’s a jukebox piece (albeit on a very high level) “Episodes” never got the respect of works such as “Agon” or “The Four Temperaments.” But those pieces have come to us more intact. The Graham section has fared no better. It was revived by her company in 1980 with costumes by Halston instead of Karinska. As I recall, the revival was panned by Arlene Croce, but there is a film of it from 1985 starring the current artistic director of the company, Janet Eilber. Perhaps it’s time to give that “Episodes” another view.
There were new casts in several sections of “Vienna Waltzes.” Peter Walker and Ashley Laracey made their debut in the first section. When you see it right after “Episodes,” there’s an unintentional echo of the “Symphony” in “Tales from the Vienna Woods.” Walker and Laracey stood at center stage initially with just a few couples in a similar position at the side. Then the waltz amplified and blossomed. Scale is part of this ballet’s story.
This season has felt like another face to NYCB. Retirements and injury have meant a different group of dancers were holding up the repertory. Laracey continued to do more, and looked patrician in the role. Megan Fairchild has been doing just about every virtuoso part, including “Voices of Spring.” Balanchine set one cryptic moment, where she circled the stage with her hands in her face as if weeping. Everyone plays that moment differently. Fairchild did it decoratively, as much a pose as an action. It sidestepped a lot of questions, such as, “Why is she crying?” After all, Anthony Huxley bowed on leaving as if to say “Be right back!” But it also sidestepped some pungency.
The “Explosions-Polka” has always been the shortest and the weakest section, but Georgina Pazcoguin’s approach was to push it way over the top in a reading that was largely mugging. What has most of the time looked like nothing now certainly looked like something, but it didn’t look like the something that Balanchine might have intended. The men, dressed like Incroyables, were led by Sebastián Villiarini-Velez in his debut. The Incroyables were certainly flirting with vulgarity with their exaggerated dress, but Balanchine never went for milking a part.
Mira Nadon and Veyette made their debuts in the “Gold and Silver Waltz.” Nadon’s take on the Merry Widow character was dark and strong. Bejeweled and in black, with one of Karinska’s best pieces of millinery atop her head, she was a very active presence, initiating as much as she reacted.
Phelan continued to inhabit the core of the repertory in perhaps the quintessential late-Farrell role: the waltzes from “Der Rosenkavalier.” She held it. As Tyler Angle entered and vanished, she could make you believe as she bowed and spun slowly that all of this might be going on in her mind, yet somehow we could see it. Leaving before the final explosion of light and waltzing, you could spy someone in the wings waiting to grab her as she leaned back as perilously far as she could.
Both “Episodes” and “Vienna” are jukeboxes, but you could see that Balanchine tried to give each work a structure. Episodes was an Errand Into the Maze: beginning formally, becoming more cryptic with the strange encounters of “Five Pieces,” “Concerto” feels as if Balanchine took the “Symphony” and pulled several pieces out, then turned it upside down to see if it would still stand. Taylor’s solo, not performed since 1989, was revived pre-pandemic in 2020 and performed by Michael Trusnovec, one of Taylor’s most compelling dancers, as well as Jovani Furlan, who had recently joined NYCB. The solo represented a full breakdown of safety; Balanchine described it to Taylor as being like a fly in a glass of milk. And finally the fist unclenched in the “Ricercata.”
“Vienna” also bounces around in time. The compositions were written in 1868, 1885, 1848, 1905, and 1946 respectively, but the ballet takes us through a century of history, much of it cataclysmic, in waltz time. So does Karinska. In what would be her last collaboration with Balanchine, almost none of the costumes are from the corresponding period to the music. They echo the spirit of the music as she and Balanchine heard it, but not its actual time. The work ends in luxury, with yards of silver fabric, shining like metal, revolving around a mirrored ballroom. In the intoxication of Richard Strauss’ waltz, we can only barely hear the noise of planes and artillery over the clink of silverware and champagne glasses.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Episodes,” “Vienna Waltzes” – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
October 5, 2022
Cover: Unity Phelan and Tyler Angle in “Vienna Waltzes.” Photo credit © Paul Kolnik.
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