Apple pie in the sky

Boston Ballet's ambitious Ode to Joy

by Jeffrey Gantz

"ODE TO JOY," Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, by George Balanchine. Cantabile, by Daniel Pelzig. Ode to Joy, by Lila York. Presented by Boston Ballet, at the Wang Center, through March 29.

To judge by the long lines outside the Wilbur last weekend, Boston just couldn't wait to see Wait Until Dark. Next door, the Wang Center seemed deserted, even though for the same money you got a live (mostly excellent) orchestra, live (mostly

excellent) orchestra, live (mostly excellent) dancing, Balanchine, a moving piece by Daniel Pelzig, and a world premiere by Lila York -- to the finale of Beethoven's Ninth, no less. True, the Wang seats 3800 to the Wilbur's 1200, so more people actually saw "Ode to Joy" than Quentin Tarantino. But the empty chairs at the Wang remain a puzzle.

Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra is also known as Rubies, the second part of the Balanchine's 1967 Jewels triptych (after Emeralds, before Diamonds -- Laura Jacobs has a superb essay on the set in the March issue of the New Criterion). Choreographed to Stravinsky's 1928-'29 masterpiece of glitter and wit for piano and (mostly) winds, it's a jazzy, circusy scherzo with dark overtones and a teasing sexuality. The Lippizaner ladies prance and preen, their vocabulary all jutting hips (think Four Temperaments) and Rockette legs; their leader allures alone, as if inviting Mr. B to join her. There's a carnival couple who skip rope, ride horses, bicycle, tango, run in place; in their sportive second-movement pas de deux (Andante rapsodico), when the piano takes over, they dance too intimately, too knowingly, to be in love. There's a predatory pack of four men: toward the end of the Presto opening movement they manipulate Mr. B's lady through a series of arabesques (the bride stripped bare by her suitors?) before she eludes their grasp; in the third movement (Allegro capriccioso) they follow -- or is it chase? -- the racing male half of the couple. And throughout there are the ladies, always leading with the pelvis, available one second, enigmatic the next.

Boston Ballet's two previous performances of Capriccio were in November of 1984 and March of 1986. New York City Ballet's ruby costumes have been replaced by a more austere black-and-gold design; it conveys what Suki Schorer called the "half jazz, half elegant" sense of the work, but who authorized the change? The company still doesn't finish on the beat, and though the corps show style and sass, they don't always command the necessary precision -- Balanchine's sharp angles keep getting rounded off.

The two couples I saw last weekend, Patrick Armand with Pollyana Ribeiro and Robert Wallace with Jennifer Gelfand, are small and speedy; longer and leaner couples would yield a more sinuous line, but longer and leaner couples as expressive as this quartet aren't overabundant these days, even at NYCB. Armand and Ribeiro are all pace and panache; Wallace and Gelfand convey a childlike sensibility and, paradoxically, more sexual danger. Kyra Strasberg's Mr. B lady anchored opening night with a riveting sexuality; every turn of her hip seems calculated to seduce. Nadia Thompson was less successful on Friday -- where Strasberg is insinuating, Thompson seems academic, almost inhibited. And where Thompson had difficulty with the flat-footed arabesques penchées that close the Presto, Strasberg moved into hers with a languid, tempting assurance. Thompson flashed her slyest smile for her curtain call -- if she were to make that smile the matrix of her performance, she'd have something.

Cantabile was Daniel Pelzig's contribution to Boston Ballet's most recent Boston International Choreography Competition, back in 1994, the Tchaikovsky year; it won him the gold medal and a job as the company's resident choreographer. Set to Tchaikovsky's early Suite No. 1 (minus the Scherzo, no great loss), it opens with a lone man on the floor looking up at a huge moon, yearning. He's joined by a second man, and friendship/romance ensues. More dancers appear, dressed pretty much the same: red polo shirts and khaki trousers for the men, khaki-edging-toward-silver dresses with red underskirts for the women. A trio soon turn into a mixed couple and a lone woman, who presides over the dance, and the lovers, as a kind of moon goddess -- while the moon itself rises up and to the left, then back over to the right.

It's rather gentle, and the steps aren't all that striking; what's memorable is the way Pelzig taps into the Romantic tension between world and dream. Toward the end of the Andante cantabile second movement, the male half of the mixed couple kneels and throws his arms imploringly around his lady's legs; she looks surprised, touched. Soon afterward a spinning quartet whirl past, and she makes as if to follow, but he prevails on her to stay. As the movement ends he's holding her by the legs, upside down and facing away from him; when she grabs his left leg, he draws it back and leans forward, bending her into a bow. It's an iconic moment, as ineffable as it is beautiful.

There are hints of pain. At the beginning of the Andante cantabile, the mixed couple dance while two other women gaze at the moon, a tableau out of Caspar David Friedrich. Toward the end of the piece, the group elevates the moon goddess (as it did to end the opening Moderato e semplice), but then everyone abandons her to stare at the moon, leaving her to run off alone. Finally everyone else runs out, except for the original man, who grabs his friend/lover by the hand to stay him, then hoists him up on his shoulder. As the curtain falls, the friend stretches his arm out longingly toward the moon.

Tchaikovsky's score is lightweight but hard to shake. So is Cantabile. Pelzig listened to the music with care; his choreography honors the sonata forms. It's not the sort of work that draws attention to the dancers, but credit both male couples -- Carlos Santos and Reagan Messer, Patrick Armand and Polo Jin -- with looking romantic, Pollyana Ribeiro with an admirable gravitas as the moon goddess, and mixed couple Tara Hench and Reagan Messer for holding their own with Larissa Ponomarenko and Laszlo Berdo.

As for Lila York's intriguing attempt at the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you can't fault her for lack of ambition. York's premise is original: she stages her ballet during the Depression, somewhere in the Midwest. The opening misty tableau conjures Géricault's Raft of the Médusa, a revolving circle of uplifted women whose outstretched arms call for help. Ode to Joy is set outside a large, aluminum-sided building flanked by what look like loading ramps. The community, obviously out of work, is in dire straits: men wearing baseball caps backwards quarrel, their women gesticulate angrily, a husband gives way to despair while his wife berates him. When, after the attempt to reprise the first three movements of his symphony, Beethoven restates the opening dissonant fanfare, York has the company restage the Géricault tableau.

This sets up both the entrance of the bass vocalist and that of York's "Freude" figure, dressed in white, who goes to the downtrodden pillars of the community and persuades them to listen to "more pleasing sounds, and more joyful." York then tries to illustrate the mini-symphony that follows. An outpouring of hand-holding goodwill and grands jetés accompanies the first three strophes of Schiller's text. There follows the scherzo (Beethoven's Turkish march), a hayseed kind of barn dance for the men, complete with allusions to football, basketball, and prizefighting. The "slow movement" reconciles the bickering couple and introduces a pas de quatre; the exuberant finale leaps for joy. So does the audience. Who wouldn't rejoice in the triumph of the human spirit?

But like Beethoven's fourth movement without its first three, Ode to Joy is all apple pie and no broccoli. Neither does it realize all the complexities of the score. I was perplexed to see the bad feeling persist through the orchestra's first three variations on the "Freude" theme, or men dancing alone while the text speaks, in the second strophe, of finding a "noble woman," and later at "Diesen Ku der ganzen Welt" -- "This kiss is for the whole world." (Where are the women in this ballet? Apart from the wife, everyone's background.) And when the "Freude" figure gestured with palms upward during the third strophe, I had a horrific flashback to that Charlie Brown animated feature where, to the exhilarating strains of Beethoven's Seventh, Snoopy as the Easter Beagle distributes colored eggs. You won't be able to make out Schiller's text (no wonder when the Chorus pro Musica is buried under the orchestra-pit overhang), and though after an odd-sounding start (Wang Center acoustic gremlins?) Jonathan McPhee shapes the score with unusually tender conviction, this movement was not meant to be heard as background music.

Like Cantabile, Ode to Joy grows with repeated viewings: the way two men start fighting just as the reference to the symphony's slow movement fails; the humorous "guy stuff" in the hayseed section; the nuances with which the husband wins back his wife during the hymnlike cadences of the "Seid umschlungen" ("Receive this embrace") strophe. But once the chorus enters, the "story" doesn't develop further, and neither does the ballet: it's generic, even bland. The one performer who makes it work is Jennifer Gelfand as the wife: with her sensational speed and exquisite extension and articulation, she's the image of a Rockwell Kent woodcut, all wounded dignity and passion. If York's piece were constructed to let everyone dance with this kind of personality, it would be a true Ode to Joy.