Last Sunday's Stern Grove concert of dancing by the San Francisco Ballet is already melting into the glow of a summer passing by very quickly. It was a heavenly afternoon, the kind that makes you feel how lucky we are to live in greater San Francisco, one of the greatest cities in the world. What a city, to have such pleasures open to all for free.
In a very real sense, the concert is above criticism, and all you should really say is, "Thank you." The afternoon was conceived as an entertainment of the most civilized kind — there was nothing heavy, no Angst, nothing austere or astringent, nothing that made your antennae register pretensions to Importance. Even a ballet as difficult to make look easy as Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15, which is devilishly tricky, looked as light as a souffle and soft as butter.
It's always fascinating to see professional dancers performing under these conditions. It's a throwback to an earlier time: the fete champetre is an ancient courtly genre. There we sit like minor royalty, in Stern Grove's refurbished amphitheater, with our picnics spread out before us, and the dancers seem a little more "like us" than usual — they share the same sunlight and shadow, the same flitting cloud cover, the same dangers of bee-stings. The dragonflies compete with them for our attention and wonder, and their beautiful bodies look a little silly in their costumes, and we can see that they can see us.
The sun came and went. Paul Taylor's Spring Rounds made an agreeable pastorale, a blurry impression of chartreuse tights flashing and melting, dancers subsiding into the floor and rising happily again in lilting, glistening phrases. The dance is set to Richard Strauss' beautifully orchestrated version of old French court dances (by Couperin), which have a dizzying way of suddenly speeding up and slowing down, like a BART train going through the tunnel. It's a ballet that does not always gel, and Sunday it didn't. Vanessa Zahorian flowed magnificently through the pas de deux, and many of the corps dancers had lovely individual moments. Garen Scribner was brilliant throughout.
Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15 is a setting of one of Mozart's garden-party compositions, "the greatest of its kind," Balanchine himself said, and the performance we saw achieved about as much as can be imagined of the casual sophistication that young people may have enjoyed in the middle of the last century on a Sunday afternoon. It's a dance for 16 people: five ballerinas, three boys, and a corps of eight more young ladies, who seem to have been outfitted by Dior in "New Look" white linen tutus. Each of the ballerinas has a delicious solo, some sparkling, some melting, with an extraordinarily witty variation for the prima (Lorena Feij—o) given pride of place. It's all made up of exactingly tricky steps, but they've been set so sensitively to the music that nothing looks difficult. The flutteriest footwork seems only an echo of the grace notes in the music. The new soloist Juliane Kepley made a winning debut.
Divertimento is famous for its formal invention. We've only just begun to get familiar with it here. Although the ballet entered the SFB repertory in 1979, it hasn't been danced much here until it was revived last year, so it's fascinating to watch the grand design being laid out. Most celebrated is the grand pas de deux, which is parceled out among the five ballerinas and danced to the most beautiful music, with one couple exiting at the end of a phrase as the next enters. The flow of dancing never stops, so there is always a couple dancing on stage, but it's never the same two for long. Somehow this seems appropriate to a ballet that's really about a way of life, a group of college-age friends who may be together now for the last time in their lives.
The program closed with fabulous dancing in Lar Lubovitch's jazz number Elemental Brubeck. Rory Hohenstein, who's the best in the world as the Boy in Red, outclassed even himself; but everybody was marvelous. Damian Smith showed once again his greatness as a partner, presenting Katita Waldo in sumptuously stretched-out phrases that seemed to go on forever. Elizabeth Miner danced better than she has since she first laid claim to the ballerina role in Mark Morris' Sylvia , and Matthew Stewart blew the roof off — well, the stage has no roof, but his bit at the end of the ballet was maybe the finest jazz dancing I've ever seen.