Our critic has seen Ashton in Florida, Balanchine in London:
by Alasrair Macaulay
Some fluke of birth and talent arranged it so that the composers Handel and Bach were born in the same year, 1685, and that Verdi and Wagner were both born in 1813. But the same fluke went further after the choreographers George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton were both born in 1904 (Balanchine in Russia, Ashton in Ecuador). The two men became friends in the early 1930s, and moved in and out of each other’s orbits until 1981, even though Balanchine mainly worked in New York and Ashton in London. During the central part of the twentieth century, the two men became the chief arbiters of classicism in ballet choreography, with effects both worldwide and enduring. (Ashton’s greatest successes were in New York.)
On the last weekend of March 2025, the Royal Ballet presented a triple bill of Balanchine ballets at Covent Garden (“Serenade”, 1934, to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings; “The Prodigal Son”, 1928, to Prokofiev’s commissioned score; “Symphony In C”, 1947, to the endlessly engaging score by the young Bizet) – while the Sarasota Ballet (the only ballet company situated on the Gulf of Mexico) presented Ashton’s rarely seen three-act “Romeo and Juliet” (1955, originally created for the Royal Danish Ballet) at the van Wezel Theatre of the Performing Arts. Who could miss Ashton’s sovereign classicism when it came to the most famous number in Prokofiev’s “Romeo” score, the Dance of the Capulets? Where other productions have the Capulet clan striding slowly to the music’s bass line in gorgeous robes, Ashton has Paris, followed by other Capulet men, jump fast, in brilliant entrechats, to the string music’s cascading melody, their legs cross-crossing in the air like duelling blades, then rounding off the long phrase with gorgeously proud arm gestures: utterly academic movements become – hauntingly – both poetic and characterful, while also making you hear more of the music.
It cannot be said too often (because it’s still too seldom recognised) that Balanchine, most of whose ballets were pure dance, was the greater dramatist of the two, while Ashton, whose ballets contain so much more elements of acting, was the more musical in the multiple levels with which he heard the music. Balanchine’s “Prodigal Son” (1928) is almost anti-Balanchine in how little classical dancing it contains – but what a story of dissipation and remorse he makes it. Prokofiev’s marvellous score grows increasingly dance-unfriendly as it proceeds, so that Balanchine depends – superbly – on basic acting movements rather than steps to show the Prodigal’s final repentance (staggering across the stage on his knees before falling at his father’s feet) and the aged patriarch’s astounding gesture of protective acceptance, scooping his son up and cloaking him in a final embrace.
Although Balanchine’s Serenade” and “Symphony in C” are masterpieces of pulsating dance, both show what a dramatist he unfailingly remained. “Serenade” steers a mysteriously romantic course through a vision of a dancing sorority in which, ultimately, one heroine enters a new and sublime plane of being. “Symphony in C”, the most audience-conscious of the three ballets, shows us four different kinds of hierarchical court atmosphere, one in each movement, each led by a different ballerina and her retinue. The sense of ceremony keeps changing until finally all four ballerinas attend the same final jubilee with their attendants – a fabulous democracy of hierarchies.
Prokofiev’s three-act “Romeo” moves away from dance in much the same way as his “Prodigal”, but Ashton resists all the way, finding every least opportunity for expressive pointwork and impassioned steps. At the start of Act Two, a folk dance in the Verona piazza turns out not to be a folk dance after all: the steps, rhythms, patterns are all classical with no loss of character. In Act Three, when Ashton’s Juliet is defying her father’s order to marry Paris, she stamps her foot furiously in relevés retirés and chases around the stage in coupés jetés onto point. Those familiar steps, brilliantly etched into the music, are given unusually percussive reaccentuation. And the highly tactile nature of her love for Romeo never fades. Even when she drags her own dying body onto his corpse, she establishes maximum physical contact, lying fully on him before her dying breath tumbles her down to his side, his arm still around her shoulders.
It’s fair to say the Sarasota Ballet – led since 2007 by the former Royal dancers Iain Webb and Margaret Barbieri – now leads the world in standards of Ashton style. True, there are imperfections: far too many fixed facial expressions (Ashton used to say “If you start with a smile, you’ve got nowhere to go”), point shoes with way over-noisy blocks, and, in general, too little of the huggably romantic sexiness that characterised Ashton’s tender view of humanity. But this company is endearingly honest-to-goodness in its energy. These dancers don’t need to be told how “Bend” was said to be Ashton’s middle name.
Over the decades, the Royal Ballet has done some superlative Balanchine performances. This programme was supervised by the Balanchine veteran Patricia Neary, a favourite with British dancers but not one who has ever brought the Royal Ballet far above the level of good drill. On April 2, “Serenade” (the most rewatchable of all ballets) on April 2 was in worse shape than I have ever seen it. The ninnies of the Covent Garden costume department have redesigned and recoloured Karinska’s marvellous dresses. Although it’s well known that the modernist Balanchine was far more allergic to fixed facial expressions than was Ashton, Marianela Nuñez and Matthew Ball nonetheless, through the second and third of its four movements, wielded bright smiles like blowtorches. Above all, the rapturous through-the-body plasticity of “Serenade” was missing: the quality that makes it Tchaikovskian.
Although the petite Natalia Osipova was physically miscast as the super-tall Siren in “Prodigal Son”, her sheer brusque decisiveness is compelling. Certainly it compelled Cesar Corrales, a Prodigal who had the role’s physical power but without any blaze of temperament, but whom Osipova commanded and conquered.
In the first movement of “Symphony in C”, Mayara Magri and Vadim Muntagirov rose blithely to the sweep and attack of the steps; as did Sae Maeda in the third. In the poignantly mysterious second movement, Melissa Hamilton was meticulously on the beat and yet outside the music, her lovely correctness all polite and small-scaled. (In the Covent Garden past, this quietly noble role has been danced gloriously by the young Darcey Bussell and the nearly unknown Lauren Cuthbertson.) The whole ballet is so fabulously constructed that it stays irresistible, but even British dancers – who have learnt how to step off balance à la Balanchine as they seldom could in the last century – can make it more overwhelming.
There were many lessons to be learned in both Sarasota and London. But the still young Sarasota company is a highly impressive achievement, whereas the Royal Ballet – heading for its centenary in 2031 – is in a high-level muddle. It dances few ballets by Ashton (still listed as its founding choreographer), and fewer of them acceptably. Apart from such honourable exceptions as Magri, Saeda, and Muntagirov, the style with which it was dancing Balanchine was not adequate for Balanchine and would have been wrong for Ashton or Petipa. The company that once set world standards for very particular points of style has now become, at best, anonymously efficient.
The Royal Ballet’s ”Three by Balanchine” programme continues at Covent Garden until Tuesday 8 April.
pic: Sarasota Ballet
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