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Oct. 20--The works of George Balanchine all take a journey, a tale often told with form and design replacing plot.
"Serenade" moves from a corps posed in ballet's first position through layers of evolving exercises, building with sublime logic to one of the most memorable final images in dance--a ballerina carried in a haunting procession, towering atop her handlers.
Balanchine the artist was on a journey too. With "The Four Temperaments," on Wednesday's program of the New York City Ballet engagement at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, we see how far his travels took him. Just as "Serenade" is leaps beyond Russian tradition, the 1946 "Temperaments," though only a dozen years later, is galaxies removed from "Serenade." "Temperaments," set to a Paul Hindemith score Balanchine commissioned, aches with mid-century angst and angularity, and it reverberates with Balanchine's ongoing integration of classicism and modernism, fused here to perfection.
Wednesday's cast performed it with luster, prowess and zeal. Among the three couples enacting the opening themes, Rebecca Krohn deserves mention for her fierce command, an almost defiant technical confidence.
Jennie Somogyi and Charles Askegard, in the sanguinic variation, deliver Balanchine's tricky, swift turns of the feet and startling jolts of contortion with unrelenting assurance.
Sebastien Marcovici is impassioned and expressive in the melancholic variation, while Albert Evans seems born to dance the phlegmatic one, his creamy moves matched by a precision all the more unsettling in his momentary meltdowns.
Sprightly Teresa Reichlen then flies on stage to leave them all in her dust.
By now, you're no doubt wondering, what of Jerome Robbins? He was represented Wednesday with the 1970 "In the Night," in some respects his follow-up to the triumphant "Dances at a Gathering" a year earlier, also set to Chopin. "Night," sensual, lush and unmercifully romantic, features three couples representing youthful infatuation, sophisticated familiarity and discord.
Wendy Whelan is prickly and sweet as the quarrelsome lover, shifting from agitation to seductiveness as if a sorceress of dance. Sofiane Sylve, employing a touch of the legato skills on view in "Symphony in C," displayed a dignity and charm born of exquisite technique. Rachel Rutherford, fragile and limber, seemed a different ballerina than the sunny athlete in Tuesday's "Concerto Barocco."
A lively, lovely revival of Balanchine's "Divertimento No. 15" completed the program.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
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