E-Mail This Article to a Friend Taking aim (continued)

The dancers the company sent out opening weekend had just about everything. Thursday night, Larissa Ponomarenko and Yury Yanowsky were an intriguingly semi-matched pair. Without the jester to play off, Yanowsky practically disappeared in the first act, though he surfaced at the end to reveal genuine anguish in the extensions of his solo before thudding into the ungainly arabesque landings of Siegfried’s tours-jetés. In the second and fourth acts, he made partnering Ponomarenko’s Odette look easy, but some aspects of his solos were labored, and in his carriage he seemed to shrink rather than expand. Ponomarenko substituted intelligence for the hysteria that can make Odettes generic; hers seemed already to have seen too many princes fail. She filled out McPhee’s languid second-act adagios with weary but not cynical nuances of phrasing, then turned ferocious for the entrechat/relevé/passé sequence that ends her solo. On stage, at least, she’s too introverted to be a natural Odile, but this time out she was more bodacious and less brittle than in 1994 or 1998. Her 32 (close enough) fouettés eschewed doubles and stayed right on the beat.

Friday night, Nelson Madrigal and Lorna Feijóo (husband and wife in real life) raised the temperature in an already warm Wang. Madrigal is not a virtuoso, and his technique lets him down at times, but he compensates with the expressiveness of his acting. Performing in the pas de trois Thursday, he made a point of looking over at Yanowsky’s Siegfried and bringing the prince back into the scene. His own Siegfried on Friday was Rhodes Scholar material, an athlete, one of the boys, but also a poet. He was the most engaged of the company’s Siegfrieds with the cookie-cutter princesses, partnering them with a wry smile but an open mind. Feijóo was a sensuous, dramatic, quicksilver Odette, with both volume and speed, and a breathtaking change of pace in her solo. Her Odile was teasingly assured, and though her fouettés weren’t quite as controlled as Ponomarenko’s, she capped off her third act with a passage of backward hops on pointe that she did faster than you can say "Alicia Alonso" (in Cuba, this is substituted for Odile’s diagonal run forward), beginning with her hands crossed in front of her, in the "no sex till we’re married" position, and ending by flinging them in the air. It almost looked as if she were making it up on the spot.

Saturday afternoon, Sarah Lamb, who’ll be a soloist with the Royal Ballet next year, had her first Odette/Odile. She was a younger Odette than either Ponomarenko or Feijóo, more fluttery, a little more held back, as if her Siegfried, Pavel Gurevich, were the first man she’d seen. She has superb upper-body articulation, and her mime was exceptionally clear. Her Odile was slinky and seductive, and she made expressive eye contact not just with Gurevich but with Viktor Plotnikov as her Rothbart. If she started her fouettés (lots of doubles) a little quickly and lost focus at the end, it was still an excellent debut. Gurevich was the most imperious Siegfried, receiving his birthday toast from the pas de trois’s Christopher Budzynski as if the man were a total stranger and, in the third act, scarcely deigning to look at the expectant princesses as he trotted past. He has a long, elegant line, not as stretched out as Yanowsky’s at the end of the first act, but he made a better impression in the tours-jetés by jettisoning the arabesque landing of the last two, and in the second act, when Lamb was chaîné-turning away from him, he bent his knees and wrapped himself around her. He’s not an explosive dancer, but he does what he does well.

Sunday afternoon, Romi Beppu also made her debut. Her Odette was all animal instinct, delicate, delineated, with particularly articulate hands, and tantalizingly slow pirouettes at the end of the White Swan pas de deux; she didn’t show much variety of facial expression but compensated with the bird-like tilt of her head. Her Odile was soft but sexy, a come-on from the moment she entered, all winks and smiles and offers that were immediately withdrawn; she ran out of gas in her fouettés, but no matter. Mindaugas Bauzys matches her prominent cheekbones, and otherwise his craggy face sets off her round one; what’s more, he hardly took his eyes off her. His Siegfried was a little withdrawn, however, and though he managed the tour-jeté arabesque landings with no little grace, his third-act variations were more satisfying than overwhelming.

It’s a mark of Boston Ballet’s current strength that the company could in one weekend field not only four principal couples but different combinations for the pas de trois, pas de cinq, and third-act ethnic dances in almost every performance. Sabi Varga’s second-act entrance as Rothbart Friday evening was a manège of awesome speed and power, but the part still seems underwritten if, as Nissinen has suggested, Rothbart is to be Siegfried’s dark alter ego. Also Friday evening, Viktor Plotnikov was a fussbudget Wolfgang who helped keep Madrigal’s Siegfried engaged. Misa Kuranaga brought an unusual lightness and delicacy of phrasing to the pas de trois and the Neapolitan dance (rechoreographed by Nissinen sans tambourines); Barbora Kohoutková brought her usual Old World nuance and savoir faire to the pas de trois and the csárdás. Married couple Christopher Budzynski and Alexandra Kochis gave the Neapolitan dance a lived-in playfulness; Budzinski and Joel Prouty gave an easy power to the pas de trois; Roman Rykine brought deep knee bends to the csárdás. Former principal Laura Young and former soloist Jennifer Glaze alternated as the queen mother; it was also a pleasure to spot former company corps member Karla Kovatch guesting among the swans.