National Ballet 2019-2020 # 4: Stunning Mixed Programme

The National Ballet's mixed programme for March combined one of the most dynamic works in the company's repertoire with a world premiere and a company premiere.  The resulting programme took the audience to limits of energy and emotion in all directions, and has to be ranked as one of the most diverse mixed programmes in recent company history.

Wayne McGregor's Chroma opened the programme.  This extraordinary piece, which fairly sizzles with energy and even danger, was first performed by the National in 2010, and has been revived at least once since then.  It remains for me one of the most memorable among all the splendid commissions of Karen Kain's tenure as Artistic Director.

The irony of the title is that the work is relatively colourless.  The architecturally conceived backdrops and side walls are white.  The dancers wear muted flesh-toned costumes, and as I learned from Stephanie Hutchison's pre-show "ballet talk," the colours are carefully selected to blend in with the individual skin tones of the various dancers.  There are some subtle colour effects in the lighting, but the vibrancy of this piece comes from the energy of the ten dancers.

Once again, the National's gifted artists pushed themselves beyond the limits of physical possibility in McGregor's rapid-fire and incredibly demanding choreography.  Even in the slower sections, the bodies continue to be stretched into contortions that continually leave me wondering, "Did I really see what I thought I just saw?"

The answer, of course, is a resounding "Yes!"  And with a number of relative newcomers to the company fitting right into the work as smoothly as the experienced veterans, the future of Chroma in the National Ballet's repertoire seems assured.  I will always look forward to a chance to see this spectacular piece again.

As I will for the second work, for completely different reasons.  Sir Frederick Ashton's Marguerite and Armand is but one of the more than 100 story ballets which he created during his long and illustrious career, but in many ways it broke new ground at its 1963 premiere.  This half-hour tragedy is kept on a miniature scale by Ashton's decision to display vignettes from the story as flashbacks, rather than trying to tell the entire tale in dance and mime.  The music, an orchestrated version of Liszt's Piano Sonata in B Minor, stands as the utter antithesis of what normally makes a story ballet score "go," yet the choice proved to be an inspired one for this case.  The use of projections on the backdrop was also innovative for its time.  The minimal setting, merely sketching in the opulence of Paris rather than depicting it literally, also foreshadowed future trends in stage design for ballet.

The real story behind the story here is the creation of the work for the immortal partnership of Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, and was featured in their farewell performances on Broadway.   No other dancers were allowed to perform it as long as they were alive.  In recent years, the work has been revived several times, and both Zenaida Yanowsky of the Royal Ballet  and Greta Hodgkinson of the National Ballet chose it to be their respective swan songs.  I'm only sorry that I wasn't able to tweak my schedule to take in one of Greta Hodgkinson's performances.

A note about the music: I'm fairly familiar with the Sonata as a listener, but would have to study the score to be sure.  However, I'm tolerably certain that pianist Zhenya Vitort played the entire work as Liszt wrote it, and that Dudley Simpson's orchestration (this is at least the third orchestral version created for this work) merely touched in key notes and phrases in certain scenes to highlight them -- as, for example, the sustained horn chords underlying the slow staccato opening phrases which recur at the midpoint and again at the end.  Vitort's masterly playing of this demanding work could stand comparison with any of the other performances I have heard.

Ashton's fluid, classically-inflected dance vocabulary demands much of the leading couple, since he didn't by any means confine himself to textbook example and precedent in his dance-making.  The intense concentration of the story demands rapid evolution through wildly conflicting states of emotion, with the need for melodramatic intensity never far away.  What makes Marguerite and Armand so memorable, for me, is the way that Ashton shaped the very specific needs of his story, based on Dumas' La dame aux camellias, to the seemingly intractable structure of the Liszt Sonata and pulled all the threads together so unforgettably in the concluding scene, where Marguerite dies to the broken, final, dying utterances of the piano.

Sonia Rodriguez and Francesco Gabriele Frola created real chemistry between them, and a sustained intensity in that final scene which would be hard to beat.  They also excelled in the bigger dramatic moments, such as the scene where Armand rips the necklace from Marguerite's neck and dashes it to the floor.  Intense and memorable characterization married to beauty of line marked the performances of these two fine artists.  

If there's a weak link in this work, it's the virtually identical required movements of Armand's father and of the Duke who takes Marguerite under his "protection ."  Yes, both of these character roles depict gentlemen of breeding, but slavish historical accuracy in this case undermines the different roles that the two play in the drama.  But this is a minor flaw.  The men of the company who portrayed Marguerite's admirers all presented a believable mixture of ardent desire and well-bred restraint.

The last and most stunning work on the programme was the world premiere of Crystal Pite's Angels' Atlas.  Pite first rocketed onto the consciousness of most of the National Ballet audience in 2009 with her previous commissioned work for the company, Emergence.  To say that most of us had never seen anything like it before would be an enormous understatement.

But anyone who came expecting this work to be Emergence, Mark II would certainly have been startled and, perhaps, disappointed.  With some thought, it's possible to detect certain similarities in Pite's dance language compared with that earlier work, but those lie only in the details.  She's far too innovative an artist to be satisfied with retreading old ground.

The point of departure for Angels' Atlas actually lies in the experiments of designer Jay Gower Taylor -- experiments dealing with the use of light on reflective surfaces.  In general terms, Pite has tried to find movement equivalents to the dance of light which can result.  I found that connection a little difficult to make, but there's no denying the power, edginess, and breathtaking beauty of the results.

Taylor's work for this piece has resulted in an evocative backdrop of projected light patterns which shift and pulse, growing, reshaping, fading as if alive and breathing.  I was continually struck by reminiscences of the famous "light show" at the end of Stanley Kubrick's film masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  There, too, light became like a living, breathing character in the story, although the means employed were very different.

In front of this pulsating environment of light, a large cast of some 40 dancers moved -- slowly one moment, quickly the next, sometimes all in unison, sometimes broken into smaller groups moving in different styles and different directions.   At key points in the work, the larger cast would dissolve into the wings, leaving a soloist or solo couple holding the stage.  At these points, the choreography grew freer, more diverse.  

The music for this remarkable ballet comprised two works for unaccompanied choir, framing a central section danced to an electronic score by Owen Belton.  Here was where the resemblance to Emergence became most marked, since Belton also created the score for that work.  The bigger framing sections, set to recordings of the Cherubic Hymn by Tchaikovsky and O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen, evoked a strong sense of wonder at the awareness of cosmos, a feeling which Pite said definitely factored into her thinking about the piece.  Lauridsen's piece especially underlined the point with its Latin text beginning, "O, great mystery...."

It was in this final section of the work that the movements of the dancers, the archaic aura of the music, and the glowing clouds and streamers of light merged into virtual symbiosis. 

I was a little doubtful of what to expect, given that Emergence wore out its welcome for me pretty quickly.  In Angels' Atlas, Crystal Pite and her creative team have achieved something both remarkable and genuinely moving.  Like the other pieces on this programme, I would be glad to see this one again -- and soon.  This work is a spectacular jewel in the crown of Karen Kain's years as artistic director of the National Ballet.

The March of the Women

Time for another one of my periodic essays which do not include a performance review.

It's no surprise to anyone involved in the musical world that the profile of women as composers and as conductors has been rising in recent years.  But it may come as a surprise to some audience members who come to concerts without specific foreknowledge of the works being played or the performers playing them.

In just the last month or so, I've encountered a whole series of experiences with music composed by women and orchestras conducted by women, so much so that the appearance of either one is beginning to seem decidedly unremarkable.  And I'm really pleased that it's finally possible to have that feeling.

In the nineteenth century, with the rise of music schools, women in a number of countries took up the art of composition and tried to make it their own.  It was a heartbreaking struggle.  Critics and audiences alike were prepared to accept a woman as a virtuoso performer, and many women musicians also rose to prominence as teachers.  But composition?  Any woman trying to get her compositions taken seriously was in for a rough ride.

One of the most prominent, Clara Schumann, abandoned her composing career because juggling the responsibilities of family with husband Robert's composing and her own extensive touring as a piano virtuoso simply left her no time.  

Or take Fanny Mendelssohn, several of whose compositions were published under the name of her brother Felix.  Her father told her that composition might be a profession for her brother, but for her it "could only be an ornament."  Ouch.

In France, Louise Farrenc soared to fame as a virtuoso pianist and teacher of the piano, but critics and audiences alike refused to take her prodigious output of instrumental compositions seriously (their loss).  One perceptive critic put his finger squarely on the problem when writing about Farrenc shortly after her death.  He summed it up by saying that audiences only approved of music by composers whose names they already knew.  This problem continues to bedevil the musical world to this day.

Attitudes didn't get much better into the earlier years of the twentieth century.  Witness the fact that American composer Amy Beach was consistently described in writing, during her lifetime, as "Mrs. Beach" -- not using her given name, but only her husband's surname.

But change was in the wind, just as it was in the field of women's rights generally.

In England, Ethel Smyth composed a wide range of music in many genres, much of it dismissed by the critics either as not ladylike when she wrote powerful music, or too weak to compare with her male colleagues when she composed more gentle pieces.

However, Smyth became unquestionably the most performed female composer in history in 1911, when her active involvement in the women's suffrage movement led her to compose a song called The March of the Women.  Although a challenging piece to perform, this song became the anthem of women's suffrage in Britain and was sung up and down the country at rallies and meetings in many cities and towns.

More than this, Smyth also succeeded in getting every single one of her six operas professionally staged during her lifetime.  That's a track record that many better-known composers might envy.  Her Mass in D was favourably compared by at least one writer to Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

During those same early years of the century, two extraordinary sisters were pursuing musical careers in Paris: Nadia and Lili Boulanger.  Nadia, the elder, abandoned active composition under her own stern self-criticism and evolved instead into the world's most important and significant teacher of composition.  Her leadership in this field, and the influence of her precepts, spanned oceans and crossed generations.  Many a famous twentieth-century composer included "studied with Nadia Boulanger" in a professional resume.  Among them are such names as Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Darius Milhaud, and Astor Piazzolla -- to name only a few.

Nadia was also an accomplished conductor, and became the first woman ever to conduct such major orchestras as the BBC Symphony and Halle Orchestras in the United Kingdom, and the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia, and Boston Symphony Orchestras in the United States.

I can't help wondering if Nadia Boulanger's decision to stop composing (she told Gabriel Fauré that she had written useless music) was in any way conditioned by the tragically brief composing career of her younger sister, Lili.

Lili Boulanger completed only 22 works before dying at the age of 24 of what was diagnosed as "intestinal tuberculosis" (it may have been Crohn's disease).  Even in that brief span, she created music of considerable substance, featuring exquisite orchestration, sophisticated vocal and choral lines, and memorable melodic materials.  Her music has finally begun to make its mark in recent years, and recordings are now available.

Matters remained much the same throughout much of the twentieth century -- a few composers, a few conductors, and always as outliers who had to be seen as remarkable only after first being seen as "women" -- which left the impression that critics, in their minds, were always thinking, "Excellent work -- for a woman."

But later in the century, change began to occur.  Conductors like JoAnn Falletta and Sian Edwards not only led significant performances in major musical centres, but laid down recordings which received the highest praise and made their work far more widely known.  In all countries, women appeared more and more prominently in the field of composition too.

And here's where I want to come at last to the musical events of the last month, the sequence of events which triggered this essay.

• In Halifax, Symphony Nova Scotia featured newly-appointed Music Director Holly Mathieson on the cover of the house programme.  The concert I attended there included a second performance of a work commissioned from leading Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy, first played by the orchestra in 2018.  That's a not-too-common event as many commissioned works get heard only once.
• Even more striking, in Ottawa I heard a second performance of a work by English-American composer Anna Clyne, given by a different orchestra than the one I heard perform the same work last year.
• In Toronto, guest conductor Elim Chan made her debut with the Toronto Symphony, and opened the concert with a work by American composer Elizabeth Ogonek.
• A few days ago, I heard for the first time ever a performance of three pieces for cello and piano by Nadia Boulanger.

In each case, I didn't hear any audience members taking particular note of the fact that all kinds of women were cropping up as conductors and composers.  The times definitely are a-changing.  And I'm smiling as I write these words.