Hurrah for Balanchine. America's great choreographic treasure is a godsend for a US ballet company needing to impress a British audience - and Pacific Northwest Ballet had some impressing to do, after opening its Sadler's Wells season with the badly judged stinker Silver Lining, the first of two programmes. We Brits do love Balanchine, and PNB's choice of Divertimento no 15 as the opener for its second programme seemed certain to be a witty, lyrical treat.
Balanchine claimed to be dissatisfied with his own setting of Mozart's score, and it is true that this ballet does not quite divine the secret heart of its music. But the outrageous panache with which the choreographer converts melody into dance, the riddling detail and texture he so artfully mines from the classical vocabulary, are a source of wonder and exhilaration.
Normally we defer to American performances of Balanchine, but at this performance PNB's cast looked curiously ill at ease with the choreography. It may be a problem with the way the women, in particular, have been schooled; they didn't seem strong enough to articulate all the brilliant facets of the movement. It may be that their imaginations hadn't been kindled to revel in the ballet's fantastical decoration. But when the programme moved on to the much more modern idiom of Nacho Duato's Jardi Tancat, the contrast was startling. With bare feet, and bodies stretched to deal with Duato's European-style expressionism, the cast of six looked like real dancers: confident, alive and convincing.
Duato's piece was oddly paired with the classical fireworks of the pas de trois from Petipa's Le Corsaire. Stanko Milov gave the audience all the gala virtuosity they were craving, and Patricia Barker was a slightly hard-nosed powerhouse. Casey Herd was a raw talent whose rough edges were more evident than his style.
The programme ended with Peter Martin's 1990 ballet Fearful Symmetries. Martin was, I think, the first choreographer to seize the opportunities of John Adams's fierce and wonderful score. The taut energy of its orchestration, its adrenaline-pumping changes of gear, can send any dance company spiralling into the ether, and PNB's cast looked high as kites. The sober truth about Martin's choreography, though, is that it squanders much of the music's brilliance. There are some fine, powered climaxes, but also a lot of windy, inconsequential repetition. Altogether an evening of mixed moments and missed chances.
