E-Mail This Article to a Friend No bear But CND2 at the Pillow and Jeffrey Tate with the BSO at Tanglewood BY JEFFREY GANTZ

The bear was a disappointment. Or rather, the absence of bear. A juvenile had been seen at my B&B the morning of the Friday I arrived, but she took the rest of the weekend off, likely making for Shakespeare and Company in the hope of snagging the famous ursine cameo role in act three of The Winter’s Tale. That aside, Jeffrey Tate and the Boston Symphony with Gil Shaham and Jane Eaglen at Tanglewood and Buglisi/Foreman Dance and Nacho Duato’s Compañía Nacional de Danza 2, both at Jacob’s Pillow, proved that a weekend in the Berkshires can provide more than (relatively) clean air and Pops-like entertainment.

Not that Shaham and Eaglen weren’t meant to be crowd pleasers. A week ago Saturday, they were the soloists on a program that opened with the Overture to Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. Tate’s texture was richer than I remember hearing from the BSO when Marek Janowski conducted the complete opera last November, and though the piece sounded static at first, he gave a sweet flow to its middle section. Shaham then came on to play the last of Mozart’s violin concertos, K.219 in A, which Wolfgang wrote when he was just 19. Shaham’s virtuosity and his sensitivity both struck me as self-conscious, and there was nothing in between. His playing was beautiful, and there was an intelligence behind it, but it hardly ever sounded like Mozart.

For the second half of the concert — Siegfried’s Rhine Journey and Funeral March and Brünnhilde’s Immolation, all from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung — Tate drew gloriously saturated playing from the orchestra, but I couldn’t follow the logic of his tempo shifts. The tension-and-release Hans Knappertsbusch creates in his Munich studio recording of the Rhine Journey was altogether absent, and though the Funeral March was heroic in its opening scope, the pairs of big brass chords weren’t heroically spaced. There’s a whole tradition of expansive Wagner, from Knappertsbusch and Wilhelm Furtwängler and Otto Klemperer on to Reginald Goodall and James Levine, that does it better. Eaglen’s voice is big, not creamy but not steely either, a worthy Wagner instrument, but Tate didn’t always pull back the volume for her, and at crucial moments — "O ihr, der Eide" and "Ruhe! Ruhe, du Gott" — his slack phrasing left her stranded.

Buglisi/Foreman Dance is the nine-year-old creation of Jacqulyn Buglisi and Donlin Foreman; both spent 20 years with the Martha Graham Dance Company, yet the five works they presented in the Doris Duke Theatre called to mind Paul Taylor and Jirí Kylián as much as Graham. Buglisi’s Pollen in the Air started with couples running onto a stage filled in white balloons, and after considerable negotiation, love was in the air also, but the music — the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth, "Des Abends" from Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, and Sibelius’s Valse triste — was twisted to fit. The couples of Foreman’s AIDS-inspired Suite: Arms Around Me (2000) transcended the piece’s concept and its Paul Taylor–derived backstage silhouette; his Lisa D. (2002; named for the composer of its music, Lisa DeSpain) is a cute tomboy-with-three-guys number that quotes Kylián’s Symphony in D. Buglisi’s Blue Cathedral (2003; inspired by Magritte’s Song of the Violet) and Requiem (2002; to Fauré) are more ambitious; Jennifer Higdon’s score for the former includes lots of overlapping phrases ("All the windows were broken") and imitation for the piece’s six women, but the closing Requiem was the indelible number, its six women stationed (as in Stations of the Cross) on blocks (as in headsman’s blocks) and making fierce use of cloaks/skirts that resonated from Jérez to Java.

Born in Valencia, Nacho Duato danced with everyone from Maurice Béjart to Alvin Ailey to Jirí Kylián, and yet the movement style he’s created for his Madrid-based Compañía Nacional de Danza, grounded but not heavy, is a palpably Spanish one that’s put his country back on the dance map. Boston Ballet staged his Without Words in February 2000 and his Jardí tancat in October 2001; the latter, from 1983, is an astonishingly assured first work. His youth company, CND2, performed three of his works in the Ted Shawn Theatre: the 1990 Na floresta, a rain-forest triptych set to music by Heitor Villa-Lobos; the 1991 Coming Together, which is set to Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together and Attica and draws on a letter by 1971 Attica prison-riot victim Sam Melville (the six men wear T-shirts that spell out "I THINK"); and the 1991 Duende, which is set to Debussy works including Danses sacrée et profane and in its tableaux salutes Vaslav Nijinsky and his L’après-midi d’un faune. Both of Duato’s companies flow like Rioja, but where CND2 is rough and energetic, CND is mature and sophisticated (you can see CND perform Duende on the Image Entertainment DVD Three by Duato, which also includes the even more jaw-dropping Arenal and Por vos muero). Duato’s choreography is all about torque, the turning of the seasons, the turning of the earth. Partnering each other with absolute trust, his dancers interpret the Spanish word alegría as a joy with no speed limit, and even when they move with gravitas, as they did at the outset of the Danse profane section of Duende, the result makes Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp look positively dour.