Not bad considering: Bernstein at the ROH
Bernstein Centenary
The Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House
Balcony D30, £8, upgraded to Stalls C4 (thanks, James)
27 March 2018
ROH page
As I entered the Royal Opera House I slightly questioned what I was doing. I usually struggle with Bernstein’s music and the prospect of a year and a half’s worth of Bernstein celebration hadn’t filled me with glee – still less that the Royal Ballet’s contribution would focus not on his interesting work with Robbins but instead on the supposed innate danceability of Bernstein’s music through new and recent works. What a misery guts! I should have remembered that despite being an evening of non-stop Bernstein this was still first and foremost a Royal Ballet show, there to celebrate above all the abilities of the Royal Ballet dancers. As usual with a mixed programme I liked each ballet to a different degree, and delighted in the dancers throughout.
The evening started on a high with Wayne McGregor’s new work Yugen, which is by far and away the most fun I’ve had while listening to the Chichester Psalms – this despite the Royal Opera Chorus’s best efforts; whatever the piece is, appropriate for opera chorus it is not. The salve provided by the ballet for such antagonism was more than ample, McGregor adopting the gentler, more fluid style he developed for part 1 of Woolf Works and, best of all, celebrating young stars risen and rising of the company, chief among them Akane Takada, Calvin Richardson and Joseph Sissens. It is sheer joy to see these dancers perform through choreography that seems to expand and fill their bodies, exquisitely dovetailed to what is best about this music. Perhaps the designs are a little too soothing on the eye, perhaps the choreography at points verges on sentimental – but I could have watched this ballet again and again.
I sort of despised Liam Scarlett’s The Age of Anxiety when it was new but either I’m now easier to please or the minor changes Scarlett has made have made the world of difference, as I enjoyed it quite a lot – even, as with Yugen, feeling rather less affectionate towards Bernstein’s ghastly Second Symphony. There is fine storytelling and strong musicality, along with beautiful set designs by the old favourite John Macfarlane. The main problem is that the story as told by Scarlett (and Bernstein) is utterly banal, achieving at best a soft nostalgia for my own bouts of drink-induced existentialism. No matter, though – it succeeds as a celebration of the cast, with Sarah Lamb, Alexander Campbell, Tristan Dyer and Bennet Gartside all excellent.
I enjoyed the programme’s other new work, Christopher Wheeldon’s Corybantic Games, for its intriguing similarity to MacMillan’s Concerto: an opening corps movement, a slow movement for pas de deux (here three of them instead of one, male-female, male-male and female-female) and an energetic final movement led by a single female, here the imperious Tierney Heap. Beyond that I wasn’t happy. I was moved by the female-female pas de deux, danced by Beatriz Stix-Brunell and Yasmine Nagdhi, and I couldn’t not admire Heap’s magnificent legs eating up the stage. But otherwise this seemed to me prissy and superficial, packed full of Wheeldonisms that seemed void of all meaning beyond creating passingly pleasing shapes to be photographed and admired statically in a glossy magazine, the effect worsened by the contributions of a big-name designer hung up on marcelled hair and corsets.
I remain bemused as to why the Royal Ballet wanted to participate in the Bernstein celebrations and can only wish the Britten centenary has been acknowledged in a similar way. But in Yugen there is a very attractive new work from the apparently softening McGregor.
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