Balanchine’s Jewels finally sparkle at La Scala

In less than a fort­night the La Scala com­pany has turned out its jewel-box and pol­ished each pre­cious stone. The shambled mess that was meant to be Balanchine’s cho­reo­graphy has become pre­cise, witty and, mainly, as Bal­anchine prob­ably would have wanted it.

Italy’s most read news­pa­per, the Cor­ri­ere della Sera, titled its review “Balanchine’s Jew­els don’t sparkle at La Scala”. It was true.

The La Scala bal­let com­pany has everything a large scale com­pany could wish for, except per­form­ance dates. It presents only five pro­grammes dur­ing the cur­rent sea­son with 50 per­form­ances at La Scala and a hand­ful of tour dates. New York City Bal­let are giv­ing 42 per­form­ances in its cur­rent six-week spring sea­son alone!

The La Scala com­pany also suf­fers from a lack of stage rehearsal time which is cru­cial for a tech­nic­ally demand­ing even­ing of Bal­anchine. So the final rehears­als have effect­ively been in front of the pay­ing cus­tom­ers dur­ing the first few per­form­ances. With the arrival of Polina Semi­onova last night everything came together.

Semi­onova danced Dia­monds with great assur­ance, toss­ing off the long, sus­tained pas de deux as though it was the easi­est thing in the world. Guil­laume Coté, who was slated to start his per­form­ances last night too, got a head start: he has been repla­cing Roberto Bolle who has a foot injury. Coté is an assured and pre­cise dan­cer, and gleamed more than he did on the first night. Apart from a couple of weak soloists, the com­pany — impress­ively coördin­ated in the final cres­cendo to Dia­monds — deserved more applause than it got from the largely touristy audience.

The sur­prise of the even­ing was Sofia Rosolini in Rubies. Now she really sparkled. Radi­ant and con­fid­ent, this tall dan­cer of eleg­ant pro­por­tions is not even in the corps, she is an “aggi­unto” or added dan­cer. After this per­form­ance she deserves some­thing more lasting.

Photo: Sofia Rosolini in Rubies

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