Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center – Dress Circle
(Seat C7, $68).
Choreography by Natalia Makarova, after Marius Petipa
Music by Ludwig Minkus, specially arranged by John
Lanchbery
Conductor – Charles Barker; Nikiya – Veronika Part, Solor
– Marcelo Gomes, The Radjah Dugumanta – Gennadi Saveliev, Gamzatti - Gillian Murphy, The High Brahmin – Victor Barbee; Sarah Lane, Devon Teuscher and
Yuriko Kajiya – Lead Shades.
Story. Nikiya, a
beautiful temple dancer, rejects the love of the High Brahmin; she instead
falls in love with the warrior Solor.
The Brahmin vows to kill Solor as a result. Separately, the Radjah wants to reward Solor
by decreeing that he marry Gamzatti, the Radjah’s daughter. Solor is overwhelmed by Gamzatti’s beauty,
and, not wanting to defy the Radjah, agrees to marry her. After being told of Nakiya’s love for Solor,
the Radjah wants to have her killed.
Gamzatti meets with Nikiya which results in Nikiya trying to kill
her. At the wedding of Solor and
Gamzatti, Nikiya is asked to dance. She
is bitten by the snake hidden in her bouquet and dies after refusing the
antidate. Solor is grief-stricken and,
being under the influence of opium, dreams of Nikiya. As the wedding ceremony of Solor and Gamzatti
progresses, the gods become angry and destroys the temple and all the
celebrants. The ballet ends with Nikiya
and Solor united again.
The story is simple enough, but doesn’t really hang
together on close examination. Few
people go to ballets to hear a gripping story anyway, so that’s okay. The ballet is also quite long, with the three
acts lasting about 60, 40 and 20 minutes.
With two intermissions thrown in, the entire show is about 2 hours 45
minutes. All together there is a lot of
dancing and music.
The three principals (Solor, Nikiya and Gamzatti) all put
in enjoyable performances. Not knowing
much about ballet, I can’t tell if they are virtuoso performances, but some of
the movements look difficult enough, and the audience certainly applauded quite
enthusiastically. ABT has a very
international staff: Gomes is from Brazil, Hart from Russia, and Murphy is
American. The group dancers also did
well, although I often wonder if they can’t be more together as a group. One dancer did trip and fall – it was when
she first came in, so Anne though perhaps the stage was slippery. From the smile on her face, she seemed okay. Act II began with the descent of The Shades
(spirits); they appeared one by one and eventually lined up six across and four
deep. The whole process took a while,
but the Act itself was pleasant enough – even though it was Solor dreaming
about the dead Nakiya.
The music is on the straight-forward side, written mostly
to support the choreography. There were
quite a few solo passages (harp, flute, violin, cello, and perhaps others), and
the soloists all did well. On the other
hand, I suspect in and of itself there is not much drama in the score. I wonder how it would work if performed as a
stand-alone piece. The orchestra sounded
well, albeit uninspired.
The sets are on the simple side, with the exception of
Act III. Even there we have only a
staircase leading up to an altar. A
dance by a golden boy started Act III (it is described as a bronze idol in the
program.) Both Anne and I had always
thought, after watching a James Bond movie, that one way to murder someone was
to paint that person all gold; evidently that is not so.
If you ignore the costumes, there is not a lot of Indian
in this ballet that supposedly happened in India. Not the music, not the dance movements (most
of them, anyway), and – in the case of Act II – not even the costume, which
Anne observed to be standard ballet costume.
This seems to be very different from the attitude taken by opera
production folks who strive for authenticity.
Perhaps the sign of a great performance is it looked
effortless. By that measure this was a
great performance. Or this could be it
is easy to meet non-existent or low expectations. Regardless, I enjoyed it.
It appears this ballet is a part of ABT’s standard
repertoire, and I managed only to find a review from May 2010. The reviewer goes into great contortion about
the possibilities of the ballet, but is ultimately disappointed at the
performance he saw. Interestingly,
Gamzatti and Solor were played by the same artists. I knew there was something about Gillian
Murphy, and the review pointed it out: “Will Gillian Murphy discover how to use
the Bette Davis features of her face?”
We ate a light meal at home before we drove into the
city. And we found street parking that
cost only 50 cents (for the 10 minutes before 7 pm). Traffic was light both ways.
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