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Not so distant light
Boston Ballet’s ‘Balanchine Martins Balanchine’
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

I’m in a third-floor studio at the Boston Ballet building waiting for the dancers to arrive to rehearse Peter Martins’s Distant Light, the middle piece in the company’s season-opening "Balanchine Martins Balanchine," whose outer parts are Rubies and Divertimento No. 15. But that doesn’t mean I’m not getting an eyeful. Violinist Jason Horowitz has lent me his score of the work to which Martins’s ballet is set, Tālā gaisma ("Distant Light"), Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks’s 1997 concerto for violin and string orchestra. Although it runs just a half-hour, in one movement, Tālā gaisma has three cadenzas, two "tempo di valse" markings, and time signatures that can jump, in consecutive bars, from 3/8 to 2/4 to 5/8 to 2/4 to 3/8. And that wavy solo-violin line above the treble staff? It’s an "aleatory section," Horowitz, who’s wearing a Mozart T-shirt, explains. The violinist improvises — which means the passage won’t ever sound the same way twice.

That in turn explains Boston Ballet music director Jonathan McPhee’s concern when he arrives, with rehearsal pianist Marina Gendel and ballet mistress Trinidad Vives, and points out that this is the first time the four dancers — principal Pollyana Ribeiro, soloists Christopher Budzynski and Mindaugas Bauzys, and corps member Raul Salamanca — will be rehearsing to live music rather than a recording. But the dancers don’t seem concerned. They’re about to start when Ribeiro says, "Hold on, I forgot to stretch." She does splits on the floor for all of 15 seconds, then jumps up and starts in on the tricky footwork of her solo. With Gendel filling in for the string orchestra, Horowitz makes Vasks’s knotty concerto soar like Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. In Martins’s work, each of the three men has a duet with the woman, but they also dance as a trio, and they circle her like a wheel. The progression is a little hard to follow because they’re not always rehearsing in sequence, but the piece looks less like faux Balanchine than some of Martins’s other works, and Ribeiro, freed from her more usual ingenue role, is innocent and implacable and inscrutable.

Everyone’s less concerned with executing steps than with coordinating the phrasing of the dancing to that of the music, and that’s another reason the piece, even in fragments, seems so natural and expressive. Ribeiro asks to run through one of her sections again — "Sorry, guys." "No problem," comes the response, "we need to hear the music one more time." After some extended gyrating on her back, she jokes, "I’m cleaning the floor today." Vives, who’s been a warm, smiling presence throughout, jumping up to demonstrate when necessary, looks at me a little doubtfully, as if the press might think there’s too much levity and not enough legwork in this rehearsal; actually, it’s the levity in the rehearsing that levitates the work. As performed by Boston Ballet, Distant Light won’t be embarrassed by its proximity to two Balanchine masterpieces. Who could ask for anything more?

Boston Ballet presents "Balanchine Martins Balanchine" October 21 through 24 at the Wang Theatre, 270 Tremont Street in the Theater District. Tickets are $18 to $98; call (800) 447-7400.


Issue Date: October 15 - 21, 2004
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