Stuttgart Ballet (live streaming), 27/11/2020

Falling Angels (mus. Reich, chor. Kylián)

Petite Mort (mus. Mozart, chor Kylián)

Le jeune homme et la Mort (mus. Bach, chor. Petit)

Artists of The Stuttgart Ballet

Andrej Jussow, piano

Jörg Halubek, organ

Stuttgart State Theatre Orchestra

Wolfgang Heinz

This short triple bill featured two ballets by Czech choreographer Jirì Kylián, who began his career with this company back in 1968, and a 20th Century classic, arguably Roland Petit's greatest ballet, Le jeune homme et la Mort.  

The two Kylián pieces were performed back to back, almost as one, as there is no décor to be changed.  Falling Angels features eight female dancers, and is set to the first part of Steve Reich's Drumming.  Beautifully lit, the women form varied geometric patterns, from which one after another breaks free into individual expression before rejoining the ranks.  It's an abstract piece, yet there is a myriad of emotion evoked here, from joy to anguish, underpinned by the pounding, insistent beat of Reich's drummers.  The precision shown by the eight dancers was admirable, clean, sharp lines, explosive energy and a kind of glee that made this a real pleasure to watch.

I would have liked to see the same precision brought to Petite Mort, at least in the opening section, where six men emerge from the darkness wielding rapiers, like a fencing class, but their line-up, compared to their female colleagues earlier, was not as pinpoint accurate.  However, the piece as a whole does not demand that same razor accuracy, it's more fluid, and the over-riding impression of these sword-wielding men, and women briefly appearing behind paniered-skirt cut-outs, is of a kind of nostalgia, enhanced by the choice of two slow movement from Mozart piano concertos.  As always with Kylián, it's immensely watchable, but I wonder if there wasn't meant to be more of a sense of pastiche than we got here.

The Petit piece dates from 1946, as opposed to the Kylián ballets which come from around 1990, and in some respects, you could say the aesthetic can seem a little dated.  Nevertheless, this is one of the great male roles of the last century, a challenge taken up by many of the biggest names in the business, notably both Nureyev and Baryshnikov.  That's not to say that the female role is less significant, but the piece does ride on the strength and range of emotion the dancer can bring to the Young Man, whereas Death is more of a one-note character.  I was surprised to learn that this was a brand-new entry to the company's repertory; for a company which boasted Marcia Haydée and Richard Cragun as their top artists throughout the late 60s and the 70s, formidable actors as much as dancers, I would have thought that they could have made this piece very much their own.  

Hyo-Jung Kang and Ciro Ernesto Mansilla
Le jeune homme et la Mort, Stuttgart Ballet, 2020 (screenshot)

Due to COVID restrictions, the Bach piece that Petit chose as his music was performed in its original organ form, rather than in the (admittedly over-inflated) orchestral transcription used by Petit, and that was where the problems began, because I didn't feel that Jörg Halubek was very comfortable with the piece, at least at the start.  It seemed stilted, almost faltering in places, and although he relaxed into it eventually, it created an awkward impression right at the start when you need to get right the winding tension of the passacaglia, the inexorability of it, from the outset.  Similarly, Ciro Ernesto Mansilla left a mitigated impression as the Young Man, not really projecting the anguish and the spiralling depression which summons Death to his side until quite some way through the ballet.  Hyo-Jung Kang, on the other hand, was excellent, sharp and predatory, a bit more ghoulish than I've seen before, but she made it work for her.  

It's a pleasure to be able to see this company perform live, and I hope (pandemic permitting) there will be more opportunities to do so over the following months.

[Next : 28th November]