Critics round-up: Royal Ballet’s “Birthday Offering”, “A Month in the Country” and “Noces”

Mon­ica Mason’s last pick­ings from the Royal Bal­let rep­er­toire before leav­ing her post as the company’s dir­ector included two works by the Royal Ballet’s founder cho­reo­grapher, Fre­d­er­ick Ashton - Birth­day Offer­ing and A Month in the Coun­try - and Bron­islava Nijinska’s “extraordin­ary” Noces. It was Ashton who invited Nij­in­ska to restage her mas­ter­piece for the com­pany in 1966 and, as the New York Times notes,

When you keep watch­ing, you see that all three bal­lets ask the same pli­ancy of the torso, tip­ping every which way while the lower body keeps busy.

The crit­ics awar­ded the Dame’s choices and the Royal Ballet’s dan­cing with a splat­ter of 4 and 5-star reviews.

Birth­day Offering

Birth­day Offer­ing was cre­ated in 1956 to cel­eb­rate the 25th anniversary of the company’s found­a­tion and to show off the company’s baller­inas to the young Queen Eliza­beth. It was, maybe, the less sat­is­fy­ing part of the even­ing. Sarah Cromp­ton for The Tele­graph had prepped up for the bal­let on YouTube:

What I had watched on stage had been pretty good but what I saw on film had a dif­fer­ent kind of del­ic­acy, which many of today’s dan­cers, how­ever skilled they are, seem to lack.

And the Fin­an­cial Times’ Clem­ent Crisp (who is no stranger at all to these bal­lets!) remarked that this was

Ashton at his most beguil­ing in mak­ing eight Fabergé vari­ations for baller­inas, and it looked as if it had been left out in the rain overnight.

As The Observer’s Luke Jen­nings points out,

…the sense over­all is of a cho­reo­graphic lan­guage at best half under­stood… every Ashto­nian grace note has been ironed out.

Debra Craine in The Times was per­plexed by the cast­ing and preparation:

Open­ing night per­form­ances were mixed. Yuhui Choe was appeal­ing and doll-like in her vari­ation, Sarah Lamb was sump­tu­ous in hers, while Roberta Mar­quez came closest to embody­ing the capri­cious fem­in­in­ity of Ashton’s writ­ing. Pas de deux hon­ours went to Tamara Rojo and Fed­erico Bon­elli, fine dan­cers both, though neither was on best form, espe­cially Rojo who seemed to be with­hold­ing her baller­ina charm.

The 7 female stars in the ‘50s included Mar­got Fon­teyn, and on the open­ing night  Tamara Rojo was dan­cing her part. Cromp­ton approved:

At least Tamara Rojo under­stands how to place her head, and let move­ment flow smoothly through her upper body, so that each phrase becomes a lyr­ical con­tinu­ation of the one before. She was lumin­ously lovely…

The Inde­pend­ent on Sunday too had no qualms about Rojo’s suitability:

What makes this revival mem­or­able is Tamara Rojo… It’s one thing to look radi­ant when being waf­ted about as if by a light breeze (thanks, Fed­erico Bon­elli). It’s quite another to retain that com­pos­ure while bour­rée­ing back­wards and bent double as if reach­ing to cut one’s toe­nails. But if this was a chal­lenge for La Rojo you wouldn’t know it.

The New York Times’ Alastair Macaulay saw a dif­fer­ent cast:

The out­stand­ing per­form­ance came from Mari­anela Nuñez in the prima role cre­ated for Mar­got Fon­teyn. Dan­cing in long phrases that con­tain an infin­ite range of dynamic sub­tleties, she has warmth, attack and luxuriance.

As did Jennings:

Only Mari­anela Nuñez… really mas­ters the switch­back sub­tlety of the steps, enun­ci­at­ing the con­trast between the swoop­ing extra­vag­ance of her arms and shoulders and the flick­er­ing pre­ci­sion of her foot­work. Like every dan­cer that Ashton loved – and he would have loved Nuñez – she dances with her eyes. It’s a tri­umphant per­form­ance but it doesn’t save the piece.

Ah well, so on to A Month in the Coun­try, which was much more satisfying.

A Month in the Country

Jen­nings states,

A Month in the Coun­try is great Ashton. Cre­ated 20 years after Birth­day Offer­ing, it was the choreographer’s final masterpiece.

A mas­ter­piece which Ismene Brown for The Arts­desk calls

Fas­cin­at­ing, in psy­cho­logy, in storytelling, in dance.

And indeed it is, though Brown was under­whelmed by the protagonists:

The tall, gentle Zenaida Yanowsky and the tall, reti­cent Rupert Pen­nefather took the lead­ing roles, and neither of them seized the ambi­val­ent pas­sions and risk of this drama by the throat.

Horses for courses; Craine loved them.

Yanowsky brings every aspect of her character’s van­ity and pas­sion to vivid life. In her dan­cing she com­bines a liquid eleg­ance with the detail of intel­li­gent think­ing… a breath­tak­ing per­form­ance that con­firms her status as the finest dance act­ress in Britain.

Wow. And then,

Pen­nefather is the dream­i­est of dan­cers and thus per­fectly cast as the young tutor… With every elong­ated phrase, with every enrap­tured gaze, Pennefather’s per­form­ance burns with romantic expect­a­tion. As a part­ner he has the gift of touch like no other — Yanowsky prac­tic­ally floated in his tender arms.

They cer­tainly divided the crit­ics. The IoS said,

Zenaida Yanowsky is too react­ive, too flappy.

Crisp observed,

Scenery was rarely chewed to less purpose.

And Cromp­ton said,

Zenaida Yanowsky seemed too large in emo­tion for the sub­tleties of the part, more des­per­ate house­wife than frus­trated wife, and Rupert Pen­nefather too bland as the tutor.

But Macaulay liked Yanowsky’s “mar­velous womanly matur­ity” and Pennefather’s  “nat­ur­ally eleg­ant expansiveness”.

He also saw another cast.

Alina Cojocaru, so well known for appear­ing as a fra­gile and inno­cent teen­ager, found unex­pec­ted qual­it­ies of weight and still­ness. She also used her feet, on the ground and in the air, with a sens­it­iv­ity that this bal­let has not seen in 20 years. [Fed­erico] Bon­elli, at once so ardent and inno­cent in style, brought a mar­velous range of detailed inflec­tions to Bely­aev, bewildered by his own new emotions.

With Noces, how­ever, every­one was won over unequivocally.

Noces

Crisp has no doubts about the wor­thi­ness of the piece.

Les Noces is one of the great dance-works of the 20th century.

And Jen­nings was in no doubt about the suit­ab­il­ity of this com­pany to dance it:

The Royal Bal­let… does many things bril­liantly, and one of these is Les Noces, a styl­ised rep­res­ent­a­tion of a Rus­sian peas­ant wed­ding, cho­reo­graphed by Bron­islava Nij­in­ska for Diaghilev’s Bal­lets Russes in 1923.

As Cromp­ton points out, the work has lost none of its punch:

It still looks rad­ical, shock­ing some­how in its depic­tion of a bride with long braided hair sent off for mar­riage, in ritu­al­istic scenes of resig­na­tion, sac­ri­fice and group fervour.

An opin­ion echoed by Jennings,

It’s grimly fatal­istic, to say the least, but it’s also one of the most power­ful and uplift­ing works in the bal­let canon.

Brown picked out two interpreters,

The work’s bold­ness can’t be dimmed, and des­pite its tight con­straints there’s a place for indi­vidu­als such as Ryoi­chi Hir­ano, the dig­ni­fied groom, and Gen­e­sia Ros­ato, as the mother in her brief, plan­gent solo of anxi­ety for her daugh­ter, to give you the human pic­ture in a few seconds.

Crisp gives a thumbs-up to the whole team,

To dan­cers – not least the final scene’s soloists, Ricardo Cervera and Deirdre Chap­man – to répétiteurs, to musi­cians and sing­ers, to Chris­topher New­ton, who staged it, to Barry Wordsworth, to every­one involved in this tre­mend­ous revival, laurels.

Craine agreed:

Cast, orches­tra and sing­ers per­formed with a thrill­ingly com­pressed energy. Stunning.

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