Beyond the festivities surrounding the New York City Ballet’s 60th Anniversary at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, including the return of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the George Balanchine ballet that inaugurated SPAC in 1966, Friday afternoon’s Saratoga premiere of a major new ballet also invites celebration. Principal dancer Tiler Peck’s big, splashy Symphonie Espagnole, her second work for NYCB, offers the great pleasure of six dancers in major roles that show them off handsomely.
Edouard Lalo’s five-movement “symphony” is really a violin concerto in disguise. NYCB’s incoming associate music director, Beatrice Jona Affron, led the orchestra through the score’s alternating stormy and playful moods, with Kurt Nikkanen on violin. As the title suggests, the French composer Lalo plays with Spanish motifs, and the American Peck - no relation to NYCB’s resident choreographer, Justin Peck - borrows gestures from tango and flamenco, gets her dancers clapping, finger-snapping, and floor-slapping, and has Roman Mejia land in stunning toreador poses.
None of this ethnochoreography is really serious. Symphonie Espagnole mainly seeks to express Lalo’s ingratiating score, which allows virtuoso dancing throughout. In the opening movement, David Gabriel’s pirouettes à la seconde, his right leg extended, introduce Emma Von Enck’s lovely spins down a diagonal line of women. Next, Kloe Walker, in a sensational red dress (Robert Perdziola did the costumes) and fronting a corps of eight women, struts with saucy openness, her fouettés and spins marking her as ready for adventure.
Mejia, leading eight men, introduces a legato flamenco-style beauty to his pirouettes and unleashes a circle of turning leaps, punctuated by leaping spins in place. And Mira Nadon and Ryan Tomash, accompanied by three other couples, explore the dance’s most intimate relationship through high lifts and turns, over-the-shoulder revolutions, and other lyrical lifts and carries.
Peck derives her ballet’s structure from big Balanchine classics like Symphony in C, with different casts for the first four movements, and the entire company of 40 onstage for the fifth. The choreography builds impressively, but Lalo’s finale sounds a bit too light and playful for the big finish Peck has assembled.
Peck also has followed Balanchine by giving the corps a lot of steps to complement the leads. In Walker’s and Mejia’s sections, the soloists stand out and the supporting dancers echo the main thrust of their dancing. In the two sections for couples, however, the corps’ dancing sometimes gets complicated enough to distract from the beautiful steps Peck has made for her principals.
Still, Symphonie Espagnole has a great deal of marvelous classical invention and should continue to reward us as we learn more of its secrets.
Peck’s ballet shared the program with two NYCB masterpieces. Because Balanchine’s 1934 Serenade was the first dance he made in America, it now pays lush tribute to the nation at 250. Further, its opening movement focuses on gorgeous, swirling choreography for a corps of 17 women, arguably making it the first democratic ballet.
As the woman abandoned by love, Unity Phelan danced with heartbreaking fluidity. In the ballet’s apotheosis, to Tschaikovsky’s two octave rising scale, her journey on an upstage diagonal, carried shoulder-high by three men, looked precarious. But Phelan, Isabella LaFreniere dancing the Russian Theme, and Emilie Gerrity as the work’s mysterious Dark Angel, performed sumptuously in this visionary ballet.
Joseph Gordon and Alexa Maxwell anchored a wonderful showing of Jerome Robbins’s 1979 dream ballet, Opus 19/The Dreamer, to Prokofiev’s first violin concerto, played by guest violinist Sean Lee. Add Serenade, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Tiler Peck’s new work, and NYCB’s summer lease had all too short a date but granted us rich dreams.
Jay Rogoff is poet laureate of Saratoga Springs and has written about dance for many years and for many publications. His most recent books are Loving in Truth and Becoming Poetry, both from LSU Press.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
