Royal Ballet (live broadcast) 09/04/2024
MacMillan Celebrated
Stravinsky : Danses concertantes
Webern / Schoenberg : Different Drummer
Fauré : Requiem*
Artists of The Royal Ballet
*Isabela Díaz, soprano
*Josef Jeongmeen Ahn, baritone
*Royal Opera Chorus
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Koen Kessels
This was a very nicely chosen programme, covering thirty years of Kenneth MacMillan's career as a choreographer, and a wide variety of styles. It began with MacMillan's first commission, in 1955, from what was then the Sadler's Wells Ballet, his Opus 1, so to speak, and the work that put him definitively on the map as a choreographer. Set to the eponymous Stravinsky work, it's a quirky, witty piece. You can see touches of Ashton, and a little Balanchine, and also, I think, Anthony Tudor slightly, but it's still quite individual, not fully-fledged MacMillan yet, but well on the way. Outright humour is comparatively rare in MacMillan's work, and I was also seeing indicators pointing to the future Elite Syncopations. I have to say that Nicholas Georgiadis's designs didn't enchant me; I was reminded of the sort of pseudo-Babylonian "court" get-up on an alien planet that you might have seen in some '30s sci-fi serial like Flash Gordon, but in eye-popping colour. However, it didn't detract from the fresh crispness of the performance, with particular mention to Taisuke Nakao for his energetic, swaggering solo.
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| Danses concertantes, The Royal Ballet Photo by Tristram Kenton (© ROH, 2024) |
Different Drummer was the most recent work on the programme, from 1984, and a very different proposition. It was the only narrative ballet tonight, based on Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, perhaps best known in its operatic form as Berg's Wozzeck. MacMillan chose music from the other members of that Second Viennese School triumvirate, and used Webern's Op. 1 Passacaglia, which is much more lyrical than his more mature output would be, and Schoenberg's elegiac and passionate Verklärte Nacht to portray, in a series of almost disjunct scenes (much like the play, and the opera, themselves), the disintegration of the title character. This was archetypal MacMillan, showcasing his extraordinary ability to analyse character in dance, and if the Captain and the Doctor appear as strange and creepy caricatures, it was because we were seeing them through Woyzeck's eyes, to whom they were certainly strange, terrible and creepy beings. Francesca Hayward was a worn, vulnerable Marie, touching in her misery, while Marcelino Sambé was outstanding, intensely focused and compelling, exploding into a final, breathtaking solo.
After the harrowing, nightmarish world of Different Drummer, Requiem came as a balm to the soul. It's a study in loss, created in 1976 as a tribute to the recently deceased John Cranko, who had been a close friend of MacMillan. Initially refused by the Royal Ballet, MacMillan took it to Cranko's home, the Stuttgart Ballet, where the loss of their director was deeply felt by all the company, and it is a company piece, on the whole. There are, technically, five solo parts, but really only one of the women's roles, the one in the white dress, feels like a full principal role. The music is Fauré's sublimely consoling Requiem Mass, magnificently delivered by the Royal Opera Chorus and Orchestra. This was, again, abstract MacMillan, but now recognisably so, with those ingenious lifts he enjoyed using so much, and a wonderful flow into and out of groupings. Lauren Cuthbertson was a quiet, fluid and serenely elegant figure, with strong partners in Lukas B. Brændsrød and Matthew Ball, in a beautiful conclusion to a very satisfying evening.
[Next : 18th April]