Morrison, Mozart and Hodgkin Inc. ... A scene from Mozart Dances at the Barbican. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
I used to have a friend who was fond of quoting from Grove's Dictionary of Music whenever I went to see the ballet Don Quixote. I have tried not to remember it, but the final line summing up the composer's career ran something like, 'He died in deserved obscurity.'
Ballet and contemporary dance don't have a great reputation as respecters of music. For much of the 19th century even the great ballets were danced to the strains of rum-ti-tum thumping out of the pit. Tchaikovsky did his best to change that, but it was only with the arrival of Balanchine in the 20th century that dance found a choreographer who wanted to embody the music in movement, not just accompany it. Balanchine, however, had little time for sets, most frequently using a turquoise scrim that matched the Maryinsky décor of his childhood.
Mark Morris, the once-enfant terrible of the contemporary world, now the Grand Old (OK, Youthfully Middle-Aged) Man, has, with Mozart Dances, opened up an entirely new world. He has drawn on one talent to equal his, one surpassingly greater, enlisted three figures of great prominence to perform alongside his dancers and produced one of the most moving and intellectually driven evenings I have ever seen. What more can one want than Morris, Howard Hodgkin, Mozart, Emmanuel Ax, Yoko Nozaki and Jane Glover (plus the Academy of St Martin in the Field)?
This is no attempt to take figures prominent in one field and see what they can do in another, the sort of reality television approach to art which I grumble about so often. This is the greatest talent, used in the way that they were meant to be seen. Morris himself must be credited with the oversight of the project, but he has been matched by Howard Hodgkin with some of the most beautiful sets I have ever seen, designs that intensify and deepen Morris' choreography. Then there is the music: two Mozart piano concertos, the F Major, no. 11, and the B flat Major, the 27th, elegantly performed around the D Major double sonata.
Every part of the evening is perfectly judged. I well remember when years ago the Royal Ballet misguidedly invited the wonderful Helen Frankenthaler to provide sets and costumes for a new ballet. She is a terrific painter, but seemingly she had little (any?) guidance about what happens when figures move in front of sets or, even worse, what happens when designs are placed on moving bodies. (One leading dancer, poor soul, was immediately dubbed 'Road-kill' when Frankenthaler's red decorations rippled up her body as she danced.) Nothing of the kind happens with the Hodgkin. The opening piece, 'Eleven' is essentially for Morris's women, and they flicker and flutter in front of three Japanese-influenced black calligraphic swoops that give a structure to Morris's movements, but don't detract from either the dancers or the music. Hodgkin's pieces are so often about weight and balance, and so is Morris. Now the music adds the time and linear elements that dance also needs - the perfect symbiosis.
The perfection of all three elements was made clear by the lack of applause between movements. Dance audiences often don't have ears: they applaud what they see, treading willy-nilly over the music. (Dancers often collude in this: the Russians are notorious for forcing the orchestra to pause in the middle of a phrase while they take a bow for a particularly flashy series of steps.) At the Barbican, a few tentative claps were immediately hushed so that not a moment of Ax's extraordinary interpretation of the two concertos was missed. Music and motion were appreciated as being of equal importance.
The final piece, 'Twenty-seven', was a paring down. This was the last piano concerto Mozart wrote, and in its final movement in particular it marked a change in his work towards a grand simplification - a honing in on essentials - that makes it remarkable. Here Hodgkin's wonderful black and red set echoes the grandeur and the scale of Mozart's ambition. Morris's characteristic use of folk-elements in his choreography can now, with these two colleagues, take wing with Mozart's pastoral dance rhythms, as one of the most extraordinarily complete evenings on stage is brought to a triumphant close.
This is the elitism that matters, that we should be rewarding: the greatest of composers, choreographers, painters and musicians, all working together in the service of a whole greater than the sum of their parts. It sounds so simple - just like Mozart.
