His “Nutcracker” (1954) — designer-labeled these days as “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” — returned to the David H. Koch Theater on Friday night for New York City Ballet’s annual Christmas season, with Clotilde Otranto conducting a lean, febrile account of Tchaikovsky’s score. The most perfect example of how much more Balanchine gives us to see, and therefore to hear in the music, than any other dance version occurs in the Act II Waltz of the Flowers. Steps, lines, rhythms and formations occur at dazzling frequency, and the speed of the Dewdrop soloist within her music is often bewildering. In consequence, we see, hear — breathe — faster.
Act I of his “Nutcracker” is even more gripping in human and dance details, reaching its peak in the accumulating miracle of the Waltz of the Snowflakes. On the way there, however, four nondance scenes make the drama altogether larger. They make the audience ask, “What’s happening?” More than that, they give intimations of transcendence.
The first of these is the overture, where nothing happens except the music. Yet the front cloth shows us elements that soar over all that follows: the snow-clad roofs of Nuremberg, a super-bright star and a winged angel.
The angel’s flight suggests the Annunciation; the star recalls the Nativity. No, this is not going to be a Nuremberg version of the Christ child story. But the imagery prepares us for both Christmas Eve and divine agency.
The next of these nondance scenes is to music interpolated from “The Sleeping Beauty”: an entr’acte featuring solo violin. True, this spoils the continuity of Tchaikovsky’s entrancingly seamless score, and the music really has non-“Nutcracker” ideas. But Balanchine takes these ideas to deepen the whole “Nutcracker” world and offers a human-size echo of the overture’s images of angelic vigilance and magical intervention.
The child Marie comes to gather her beloved Nutcracker in her arms before she goes to sleep; then her mother arrives to find her and in turn protect her from the night’s chill with a shawl; and finally Marie’s godfather, Drosselmeier, arrives to survey the scene and to inspect (and prepare) the Nutcracker he gave Marie for purposes as yet undivulged. Balanchine simply lets this violin meditation cast a spell deeper than his stage action explains; I love best that for a moment nothing happens onstage at all, so that we just listen in suspense while the violin suggests the sleeper’s vision, organic inner growth and transcendent beauty.
Soon there follows the most celebrated scene change in all ballet. The room grows outsize, and the Christmas tree rises volcanically upward out of the ground until the star is out of sight. (When Balanchine was preparing this production in 1954, colleagues anxious about the expense proposed that he stage the ballet without the ascending tree. He’s said to have replied, essentially, the ballet is the Christmas tree.)
Balanchine’s timing of the events that precede and follow his tree’s growth is unmatched. We’ve already lived through Marie’s heart-racing excitement at discovering that the toy soldiers have become as large as she. Now the tree rises while she, right before it, clutches the ballet’s tiny protagonist to her heart. And the scene’s Wonderland climax occurs not when the tree stops growing, but when that very Nutcracker, after vanishing offstage, returns — now her size too.
What theatrical marvel could surpass this? Well, the very next scene change (after the battle between mice and soldiers). Tchaikovsky has already created music of metamorphosis. Now he suggests transfiguration.
You can hear why most choreographers can’t resist setting this as a dance — in most cases as an exultantly romantic pas de deux (heroine with her transformed Nutcracker, Snow King and Queen, whoever). Any mere duet, however, is going to look tritely overambitious beside this ever-rising tide of musical wonder. Balanchine, with no dance at all, supplies far more meaning. And he shows how Tchaikovsky is Wagner’s only equal in creating scene-change music that is sublimely dramatic.
The scene starts with the Nutcracker triumphant but as yet unredeemed, and his academic dance gesture — tendu side, with arms open wide — is among the strangest in dance theater because its formal radiance clashes with his large, immobile head. Then he, becoming the next figure to guard the sleeping Marie after her mother and Drosselmeier, summons the bed on which she lies to follow him; magically, it obeys.
New scenery arrives, swag after swag; the Nutcracker walks offstage but the bed remains, circling as if in a vortex, until the stage has fully become the Land of Snow and the Nutcracker returns. Now at last we see him transformed, shedding his Nutcracker surface like a husk, revealing the elegant princeling within, and he strikes again that proclamatory tendu-side gesture.
At Friday’s performance some of the foppish glee Robert La Fosse displayed as Drosselmeier at the party could be questioned, but this is the interpretative choice of an enjoyably lively stage artist. Children, corps de ballet and soloists all did admirably, with especially fine contributions from Marie (Fiona Brennan), Fritz (Gregor MacKenzie Gillen) and Soldier (Troy Schumacher).
This didn’t feel, however, like an opening night. Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many; and Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm. They’re among the few City Ballet principals who dance like adults, but without adult depth or complexity. Ashley Bouder (Dewdrop) has the brilliance they lack, but also a greater and more tough-grained hardness. Even Teresa Reichlen (as Coffee), often one of the company’s freshest and most multidimensional dancers, performed with a glassiness I don’t recall. And Ms. Otranto’s conducting lacked the moment-by-moment rapport with her dancers that turns a safe performance into a tingling one.
“George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” continues through Jan. 2 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; nycballet.org.
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