by Leigh Witchel
As the new season begins at New York City Ballet, Balanchine-Robbins triple bill is a known quantity. Not only have the ballets been done often, but on this program, with the exception of one debut, the dancers had done these parts often. I’ve even written about some of them before. Still, the reason it’s a privilege to go often is there’s always something new to see.
Duo Concertant had a low-key performance to start, but woke up eventually. Megan Fairchild knows what she wants from the piece. Anthony Huxley partnered her well, but didn’t loosen up until the Gigue in a ballet that could use a lighter demeanor. But once the pace picked up, Huxley embellished the dance with detailed footwork; Fairchild followed with her own.
At the moment when he asked for her hand and she refused coyly, he had a way of asking again that worked nicely for him: unfazed and arcing his arm up with a more elegant flourish than the first, as if the secret was just to ask more handsomely. The final movement was not as successful. You need to sell that little tale of a muse lost and found, and the loss didn’t register in Huxley’s body.
Unity Phelan and Adrian Danchig-Waring did the long Facades adagio at the center of Glass Pieces. Often, that duet revolves around its unbroken cantilena line. This time, it felt more about the pauses in between the long phrases, especially the repeated Egyptian frieze pose that foreshadowed Akhnaten. Phelan and Danchig-Waring saw the dance as sculptural, and made a case for that in sculpting even movement in between the punctuation. They did a final pose to a reach before a jeté off.
Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 is familiar to Tiler Peck as well, though she did it with a new partner tonight, Chun Wai Chan, who made his debut on opening night. This performance, if not one of the rare ones you remember for years, was very solid. Like Fairchild, Peck was prepared, and she leaned on her timing. She’s always been musically acute with the control to switch between fast and slow, carefully gauging her turn speed in the treacherous opening. She did those swivel turns by coasting up to them: leisurely but with authority. At the end of the first movement she started her piqué turns en tournant exaggeratedly slow to start, then sped them up to a blistering pace.
Going into the adagio, again Peck came in prepared and deployed her effects elegantly. As always, Chan’s debut was both well-danced and reliable. He’s a strong partner, but his job in repertory is made easier by his classical training. He got where this adagio came from and what it referred to. When Chan bowed to leave, there was an unstudied elegance to it. He didn’t need to make it into something.
One of the ongoing conundrum for some soloists in the company is – who are they? With Olivia MacKinnon it’s been a slow unfolding. As the solo ballerina here, she had a spirited attack on entry. She’s better at allegro temperamentally, though she’s not a pyrotechnician. With Jules Mabie and Davide Riccardo she danced a good pas de trois at the end of the first movement; it held up even through the treacherous turns with arms overhead at the end.
She’s not just a miscast allegro dancer, though. In the final movement, you could see the thoughtfulness in MacKinnon’s port de bras when she did piqués in a circle coming round to end with an arm curled carefully upwards just so.
The energy shot up in the corps in the final movement; the woman came sailing out. Chan had no problem with his last solo; it’s practically Swan Lake, Act 3. Before that, Peck nailed her fouettés then spun into a blur of chaînés. A sparkling moment in a more relaxed performance, but this is where you can see the ways she has gotten older. Not from diminishing technique, but because she looks as if she has less and less to prove.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, Duo Concertant, Glass Pieces – New York City Ballet
Lincoln Center, New York, NY
September 20, 2024
Cover: Unity Phelan and Adrian Danchig-Waring in Glass Pieces. Photo © Erin Baiano.
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