Alaska News

Review: Little dance in symphony's ballet concert

If anyone felt a little bit cheated by Saturday's Anchorage Symphony Orchestra concert, they didn't show it in their applause. Billed as "An Evening at the Ballet" with dancers from Chicago's Joffrey Ballet company, the evening contained exactly two dancers who performed in two of the eight works -- 13 numbers if you count the movements and scenes separately.

On the other hand, they were very good dancers. The nearly full house applauded loud and long.

Yumella Garcia and Ogulcan Borova paired in the balcony scene from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet." This piece is mainly Romeo's number, with a series of wonderful fouettes, whip-like turns, spinning arabesques and various lifts expressing his joy at being alone with his girlfriend. It featured a small double-story set supplying the balcony on one side of the stage.

In the second half of the program they danced the beautiful adagio pas de deux from "Spartacus" by Aram Kachaturian. Borova had some splendid jetes, split-like leaps, but Garcia's near-constant work en pointe dominated the action. The great over-the-head lift at the climax happened about one measure before the music indicated, but Garcia's final gesture mixing hope and despair as her man goes off to his doom was heart-melting.

The rest of the numbers, all instrumental, were taken from ballet scores. From the standpoint of precision, no small matter, the symphony was a mixed bag. The violins were as rich and on pitch as I can remember in the two Tchaikovsky items, the waltz from "Sleeping Beauty" and the finale of "Swan Lake," but they seemed under-rehearsed and uncertain, having a difficult time following the beat of conductor Ronald Foster. Though Foster signaled the strings for more volume at the end of certain pieces, there was no more to be had; he'd already driven them to their limit. The matter had to do with the number of players, not with their effort and the conductor's unfamiliarity with the ensemble.

The brass also struggled, though the trombones played the counter-motif in the "Montagues and Capulets" section of "Romeo," the best-known part of that ballet, with commendable cleanness and presence.

Yet there was flatness to some of the music, in part because it was composed as the servant to the dance action. The excerpts from Bernstein's "Fancy Free" languished in the realm of idle conversation. The waltz from Kachaturian's "Masquerade" likewise missed a sense of arc. The fiery orchestration of the finale of de Falla's "Three-Cornered Hat" became a windowless wall of sound at the expense of nuance. The pizzicatos from the second violins, for example, were inaudible. I'm guessing the composer wrote notes because he wanted us to hear them.

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Though the most recent work on the bill debuted 60 years ago, "An Evening at the Ballet" was announced as a "world premiere." That's only true in the sense that the producers of the program Anchorage heard have plans to take it on the road; Atwood Concert Hall was the first venue where it was presented to an audience.

The "Spartacus" adagio and last part of Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite," which concluded the program, had the orchestra playing at perhaps their best of the evening. The quiet transition to the finale in the Stravinsky was marred, however, by children somewhere in the balcony who became rather noisy at that moment.

I don't know when it became acceptable to bring very young family members to symphony concerts. There's probably an argument for letting budding dancers see real ballet, but such things should wait until the child is at least old enough to speak and understand instructions from parents. If baby sitters now cost more than seats at the symphony, it's still not a good reason to disturb the attention of adults who have spent upwards of $50 on their own ticket.

That said, parents wanting to expose well-deported youngsters to great music -- and I fully recommend making the effort -- should consider taking them to the performance of the Anchorage Youth Symphony in the Atwood Concert Hall at 7 p.m. tonight. Not that the music or the playing is any less serious than with the ASO, but in my experience young people seem to respond with greater interest when other young people do the performing. That program will include a "visual presentation" from Anchorage's early history as part of the city's Centennial Celebration. Tickets are available at centertix.net.

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham has been a reporter and editor at the ADN since 1994, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print.

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