I've told this story before, but bear with me because it is apropos of the San Francisco Ballet's subscription program 2, which opened last Tuesday at the War Memorial Opera House. When Mark Morris Dance Group showed The Office at UC Berkeley, the music, Dvorak's Bagatelles, was new to me. I immediately went to the Tower Annex to find a copy. The clerk said, "What's up with this? You're the fourth person to ask for it this week." What was up was that Morris once again had found an obscure but perfect score, this time for a terrifyingly normal "folk ballet" about loss.
I mention this more in sadness than in anger, because program 2 suffers greatly from inappropriate, ugly, shallow musical choices. The decor and costumes for two new pieces are handsome. The music is well-played, though how you could tell in some places is beyond me. And as always, SFB's principals and soloists look breathtaking. Gonzalo Garcia and Yuan Yuan Tan produce a blaze of neo-classical heat in the Apollo-Terpsichore duet from Balanchine's Apollo, which opens the program.
It also, unfortunately, sinks the ship, because Stravinsky's gorgeous 1928 score for strings is so ravishing, it typifies Balanchine's "If you don't like the choreography, close your eyes and listen to the music." Do, absolutely, when Martin West and the SFB Orchestra are making fabulous noises at once lean and rich. Yet I could not imagine shutting my eyes and listening to Elena Katz-Cherin's piano-violin rags, or to bleeding chunks of Bach, John Cage and Arvo Part, followed by Steven Mackey's tortured-cat wailings on electric guitar. On the way up the aisle, a trio of 40-somethings, who shouldn't have any fear of rock n roll, were grumping, "What was that? My ears are still ringing. I don't go the ballet to hear ugly music!"
I don't, either, and I don't go to hear music dismembered. I'm still frothing over Twyla Tharp's ham-handed reordering of Haydn symphonies in the Joffrey's As Time Goes By, c. 1973. Give Helgi Tomasson credit for playing Katz-Cherin straight in Blue Rose, his world premiere. The sheer, dancey jazziness of her duos (Natasha Feygina, piano; Roy Malan, violin) must have appealed to him. Yet SFB already has a real Scott Joplin ballet, Macmillan's tawdry Elite Syncopations. What it needs with K-Mart Joplin is beyond me.
This piece for three couples showed off SFB's three scrumptious Frenchmen — Pierre-Francois Vilanoba, Pascal Molat and Nicolas Blanc — in duets with Lorena Feijoo, Tina LeBlanc and Vanessa Zahorian. Tomasson keeps it light — even a competitive duet for Vilanoba and Blanc is amusing — but the music reminded me of those awful Oscars tunes; you have to grit your teeth to wade through the slush.
Four seasons
Maybe on another program, Blue Rose might have more low-key charm, but when followed by Christopher Wheeldon's pretentious "Four Seasons" ballet, Quaternary, with its scrambled-eggs music, the juxtaposition was too torturous to the trained ear. Wheeldon, whose reputation as ballet's crown prince eludes me, was so eager to push his seasonal concept that he cannibalized one immortal master, one decent composer, one theoretician and (dare I say it?) one fraud. Well, at least he didn't have at Vivaldi. No composer, however bad, deserves to be hacked in little pieces.
Yet hack away Wheeldon does, opening with "Winter," a severe chill cast by Tan and Damian Smith, wearing Jean-Marc Puissant's silver and aqua tunics. Michael McGraw pounded Cage's "Perilous Night" on the prepared piano. Thank Buddha for "Spring," even if it meant dismembered Bach, two pieces each from the first two Cello Suites for solo cello (David Kadarauch). From the verdant backdrop and the real music, one could gather courage for the following.
I love Arvo Part's music, but not his solo piano works (in this case, "Fur Alina," a bad joke anyway), which served for the stern, heavy-breathing duet of Muriel Maffre and Yuri Possokhov. He looked out of shape in a badly-fitted white tunic, but, bare-chested in the finale, maintained his hunky charisma. Finally, composer Steven Mackey (a favorite of Michael Tilson Thomas; as Joe E. Brown would say, "Nobody's perfect") picked up his electric guitar and made everybody wince. Loud, bleak and as appealing as a baby's open grave, this "Autumn" section found Katita Waldo and Vilanoba joining the other couples and corps for what I guess Wheeldon thought was a "rock n roll" finale. Not. The aged, commercialized Rolling Stones at the Super Bowl had more authentic rock in their little fingers.
From the musical or non-musical standpoint, this was as distressing an evening as I've spent at the ballet in ages. SFB has wonderful dancers on stage and great musicians in the pit. Shouldn't we honor them with a modicum of musical taste? www.sfballet.org.