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Doctor Zhivago on ’GBH, Rembrandt at the MFA, Balanchine at Boston Ballet
JEFFREY GANTZ
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"God is in the details" may have first been uttered by Gustave Flaubert ("Le bon Dieu est dans le detail"), but these days the aphorism is most often attributed to the Dutch-descended architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and little wonder: from Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden on through to Bosch and Bruegel and then Rembrandt and Vermeer and the innumerable landscapes and still lifes, it could be a definition of Dutch and Flemish art. "Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter • Draftsman • Etcher," which opened this past Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, is a voyage into the kind of detail you might have thought only God could imagine. A lesser artist would have made it his "Unimaginable Density of Being," but Rembrandt’s work is also light, lit in a way that neither darkness nor density can comprehend. What the Neo-Platonist Botticelli is to Annunciation, Rembrandt is to Incarnation. The incarnation of "Rembrandt’s Journey" at the MFA (in February the show will go on to the Art Institute of Chicago, its only other stop) is close to a gift from Heaven. It comprises 218 pieces, of which some 20 are oils and some 30 drawings; the rest are etchings and etching plates. The primacy of "Painting" in the title aside, this is not a show of great Rembrandt oils: you won’t see The Syndics of the Cloth Guild or "The Jewish Bride" or "The Night Watch." But that’s no reason for gnashing of teeth. This artist’s genius manifests itself in the tiniest of details. "Rembrandt’s Journey" is primarily an etching show, and his etching is all about detail. At the MFA, the journey has been subdivided into many mini journeys, panels of up to half a dozen works that demonstrate Rembrandt’s handling of a particular theme. The museum would appear to have taken its cue from its neighbor the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s 2000 show "Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt: Art and Ambition in Leiden 1629–1631," one of that museum’s one-room, single-theme jewels; instead of being confronted with more than 200 works, you’re invited to look at and think about a few at a time, in the context of a unifying idea. The presentation is very approximately chronological, but you can start anywhere and focus on the themes — mostly Biblical, but there are also landscapes and portraits — that most interest you. The one thing you can’t do is go in without a magnifying glass. I’m not exaggerating: you can see the oils and the drawings all right, but if you try to look at the etchings with the naked eye, you’ll miss out on 95 percent of "Rembrandt’s Journey." If you don’t have a glass to bring from home, the MFA will sell you a fine one at the door for $3. The MFA painting that’s on the cover of the paperbound catalogue, The Artist in His Studio (circa 1628), provides a general introduction to this artist. He deals in life’s ambivalences and ambiguities, so he’s not going to tell us whether the subject is Rembrandt van Rijn or a friend of Rembrandt’s or just EveryArtist. He shows us the artist’s palettes, the artist’s whetstone, even the grooves in the easel crossbar where the artist places his feet. But you’ll have to decide for yourself why the artist seems to be swaddled in clothes that are too big (the ones Rembrandt is hoping to grow into?), why he’s nowhere near the easel, why the canvas on the easel is so huge, why it has its back to us, and why the light in the room seems to be emanating from it. Even the size of this painting seems a sly joke: it’s just 10 by 12 inches. The etchings, on the other hand, mostly describe a battle between light and dark. The Adoration of the Shepherds, who it’s clear have come at night, is so black, you’ll need the magnifying glass to make out the visitors with their lantern, and Mary as she reveals to them the sleeping Jesus, and Joseph, who’s reading — by firelight? Or does the light emanate from Jesus? The Stars of the Kings depicts a Twelfth Night procession in similar terms, with the only light coming from the pinwheel star. The three states of Christ Crucified Between Two Thieves show the typical shift in Rembrandt’s point of view from outer world to inner, from the chaotic detail, à la Bosch or Bruegel, of the first to the nightmare limbo and sheeting light of the third. The illumination of the first Entombment suggests candles in a crypt and a small gathering of the faithful laying Jesus, with his frozen face, to rest; in the third, darkness has enveloped the scene and only that frozen face is visible, a light departing this world. Rembrandt’s "light" also takes the form of white space: the brown-ink drawing Christ Carrying the Cross looks almost like a Picasso, and "Winter Landscape" is so bare, scholars aren’t certain whether the season is winter or summer. But what in the end stamps him as a great artist is his ability to make humanity out of almost nothing, whether it’s Mary’s rapt expression in The Adoration of the Shepherds or the smirking faces of Sarah and Isaac (he’s in the shadows at the extreme left) in Abraham Casting Out Hagar and Ishmael. There is, it seems, nothing Rembrandt can’t show us — and nothing he doesn’t want to. LIKE REMBRANDT, GEORGE BALANCHINE was a master of the obvious: his simple things, done right, have the look of divine creation. Last weekend, it was Boston Ballet’s task to do things right, with the help of guest artist Ethan Stiefel from American Ballet Theatre, yet another member of ABT’s Born To Be Wild quartet. Called "Stars and Stripes," the program had Balanchine’s Mozartiana (1981) and Stars and Stripes (1958) sandwiching David Dawson’s The Grey Area, which got its premiere last year from the Dutch National Ballet. I had thought Mozartiana, which Balanchine redid for Suzanne Farrell, would have too much gravity for an opener, but it became almost lighthearted in juxtaposition with the purgatorial gloom of Dawson’s work, which in turn gave Stars and Stripes more weight than it often has at the end of an all-Balanchine program. (Marcia Siegel’s take on this production is in the "Dance" section.) When the curtain rose on The Grey Area and I saw the immense gray curtain stage left, my first thought was the Berlin Wall, but the sonic booms of Niels Lanz’s electronic score suggested Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic, whereupon the wall became the hull of the great liner and the sub-aqueous movement began to recall Elisa Monte’s Treading. The five dancers (opening night they were Adriana Suárez, Sarah Lamb, Yury Yanowsky, Lorna Feijóo, and Sabi Varga), wearing not much more than the rags of their souls, start facing the wall; Suárez moves away from it with Lamb and Yanowsky, then returns to "collect" Feijóo and Varga. A period of yearning and stretching but not much connecting culminates in a duet for Lamb and Yanowsky that had some breathtaking lifts. The duet for Suárez and Varga ends in his walking away from her; there’s an interlude in which all five dancers, each in his or her lane, retreat upstage writhing like tortured sea anemones before running back downstage and starting over; then Feijóo dances with Varga before the work returns more or less to where it started, Feijóo and Varga now in medias res, the other three moving out from the wall, Suárez distanced from Lamb and Yanowsky. These last two in particular created meaning out of sheer speed and extension, and overall there was no lack of energy or commitment, but after four viewings I still had no sense of where the piece is moving to (if in fact it’s moving anywhere), whether the three duets are distinguished from one another in any way or just represent dancers blowing in the Infernal wind like Paolo and Francesca. The second cast — Romi Beppu, Larissa Ponomarenko, Jared Redick, Sarah Lamb, and Raul Salamanca — seemed a hair less committed, or maybe just less rehearsed. Set to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Suite, with the Ave Verum Corpus Preghiera ("prayer") third movement placed first, Mozartiana is a novel kind of totentanz, death and afterlife in black and white, for a ballerina (Farrell, in black with a white tulle underskirt) and her partner (white shirt and tights, black vest), a psychopomp jester (black with white trim), and eight women (four corps members, four students, all in black). As in 1994, when the company last did this piece, Ponomarenko was Blessed Virgin–like, devout, otherworldly, almost ecstatic. Stiefel was big, soft, and centered; together they brought to mind the Count and the Countess of Le nozze di Figaro. Suárez and Miao Zong, on the other hand, were Susanna and Figaro. More earthbound than Ponomarenko, more naive and yet more knowing, Suárez was as moving as I’ve ever seen her, from the anguished extension of her clenched hands in the Preghiera to the witty withholding of that last step in the first two phrases of the Theme and Variations’ first variation. Zong wasn’t exactly a raffish Figaro, but he danced cleanly (his sixth variation entrechats were particularly limpid) and partnered her with attentive grace. As the man in black, Nelson Madrigal moved with disarming ease, the suggestiveness of his steps suggesting the transitory nature of life. Jared Redick was more solicitous in delineating the choreography (it’s clear he’s improved his technique over the summer) but left me wondering whether Death should have to work so hard. The corps members and students didn’t lack for effort, but sometimes it seemed that arms and legs were assuming positions rather than flowing into them. Doing simple Balanchine just right is hard enough; doing it to Tchaikovsky’s Mozart is almost impossible. Stars and Stripes almost seems to do itself, but that’s just Balanchine making the impossible look easy. Its Five Campaigns — all named after marches by John Philip Sousa — combine the sensibilities of a West Point weekend and a John Ford Western, with Liberty Bell’s yellow feather like the ribbon that Joanne Dru puts in her hair in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. It’s both a salute to and a send-up of the American ’50s; you can’t tell whether the cadets and the drum majorettes are part of a war machine or a football game’s halftime marching band. I’m not sure why Boston Ballet wanted to stage this piece: as opposed to solo performers who can do Balanchine’s steps and imbue them with feeling (which this company has), it calls for the kind of precision-drilled corps that the Paris Opera Ballet showed off in its Balanchine program earlier this month. The company did Stars and Stripes back in 1969, but to my knowledge the only part of it Boston has seen since is the El Capitán–Liberty Bell duet that Jock Soto and Lourdes Lopez performed as the finale of the "Principal Dancers of NYCB" tour that came to the Shubert Theatre in October of 1993. The ladies of the Corcoran Cadets and the Rifle Regiment can get their legs up and kick just fine (so who needs the Rockettes?), but as in Mozartiana limbs don’t snap into place, and ensemble isn’t sharp. This choreography is hard to do when you don’t do it all the time. Kudos to the Thunder and Gladiator men, however, for the quartet of double tours landed square and on the button, and especially to leader Christopher Budzynski, who melded big technique to Mickey Rooney swagger. As Liberty Bell and El Capitán, Sarah Lamb and Ethan Stiefel were as iconic as Cathy Downs and Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine, Lamb exquisite in her positions, Stiefel hick-humorous in attitude and in his secondes executing jawdropping little hops on his standing leg. Pollyana Ribeiro and Nelson Madrigal were more playful; Lorna Feijóo and Yury Yanowsky, so well-matched the week before as Kitri and Basilio, looked like refugees from a Howard Hawks film. I wonder whether Feijóo might have worked better with Madrigal (who’s her husband) and Ribeiro with Yanowsky. Most notable of the other soloists were Lamb (just a little tentative) leading the Corcoran Cadets and Melanie Atkins (the right attitude but not quite the weight) and Barbora Kohoutková (the spirit but not the speed) heading the Rifle Regiment. For all that the performances were a little ragged, I found them warmer than the one time I saw NYCB do Stars and Stripes, February 2000, with Wendy Whelan and Damian Woetzel. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO offers detail on an entirely different scale. Boris Pasternak’s 1957 epic begins around the turn of the century and follows Yurii Andreievich to his death in 1929, tacking on an epilogue from 1943. The novel pinpoints — Pasternak was also a poet, after all — but it also elides, and it often reads more like an essay, Pasternak’s voice obliterating those of his characters. David Lean made what he could of this in his 200-minute 1965 film, shaping and simplifying it into a glossy romantic melodrama and getting accurate performances from Rod Steiger (Viktor Komarovsky), Tom Courtenay (Pavel Antipov), and Alec Guinness (Evgraf Zhivago) and heartfelt ones from Omar Sharif (Yurii), Julie Christie (Lara Antipova), and Geraldine Chaplin (Tonia Zhivago). Now Masterpiece Theatre’s puzzlingly titled "American Collection" is bringing us a 240-minute British remake. The idea, I presume, is to be truer to the novel, and it’s been realized to some extent: Lara misses Viktor when she tries to shoot him at the Sventitskys’ Christmas party; Lara is present when Tonia delivers her second child; Pavel turns up at Varykino and talks with Yurii after Lara has left with Viktor. But huge chunks of the novel are still missing, notably the last eight or 10 years of Yurii’s life, when he returns to Moscow, goes to seed, takes up with Marina Markelovich, and has two daughters before dying of that heart attack (and no, it’s not because he sees Lara). This version also dispenses with Evgraf, Yurii’s half-brother, and instead of a daughter, Yurii and Lara have a cute little boy whose freedom becomes the final image. The real problems here, though, are that the script is hopelessly English ("I don’t think you give tuppence for me," Pavel says to Lara at one point) and that, Sam Neill’s magnificent weasel of a Komarovsky (Steiger was more bearish) aside, the actors give small performances, from Hans Matheson’s Hugh-Grant-as-a-young-buck Yurii to Keira Knightley’s makes-Julie-Christie-seem-Russian Lara. The best I can say for this Zhivago is that it’ll make you appreciate Lean’s original.
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