Last year ABT created enormous expectations as it went about promoting Alexei Ratmansky's new Firebird which turned to wet feathers and ash upon its first performance. Having learned an important lesson, this year the company created almost no expectations for the full evening of new Ratmansky works to the music of Shostakovich. No splashy video snippets. No previews of costumes or scenery. Of course, we had already seen a third of the program when Symphony #9 premiered last fall at City Center. But since that time, little has been revealed about the other two-thirds of the program or how the evening of works would tie together as a whole. A significant, last minute change in music for the third ballet only weeks before ABT's Met season opened seemed to suggest some creative difficulties were afoot. So, Haglund's expectations were loose and low, as they say on the sidewalks of Hell's Kitchen, when he attended Saturday's matinee performance.
In a nutshell, the program which is referred to as Shostakovich Trilogy, consisted of three separate dances by Ratmansky to Shostakovich's music. Each piece succeeded on its own as a work, and together they conveyed a sense of the struggle for Russians trying to survive during the Stalin era. The whole thing desperately needs notes in the Playbill if ABT intends for the general audience to understand it.
The scenery by George Tsypin is irresistible. In the first piece, Symphony #9, Tsypin designed a backdrop with a collection of drawings that helped put the ballet into its historical time period: a bi-plane, men dressed in 1930s fashion, possibly the Hindenburg, and of course, red flags everywhere to suggest not only the Soviet Union but that which red flags customarily/figuratively/colloquially suggest. For the second dance, Chamber Symphony, Tsypin based the backdrop on a painting by Pavel Filonov, a Russian avant-garde painter from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Typsin possibly took his inspiration from Filonov's Eleven Heads since the backdrop had several heads whose eyes stared down onto the stage with very stern and threatening expressions. For the final dance, Piano Concerto #1, Tsypin created an ingenious collection of hanging red ornaments with a Soviet political theme: some stars like the one that was on the Soviet flag, a hammer, a sickle, and so forth. But these items were not all intact and some were broken off, seemingly crumbling downward. As the fine pianist Alan Moverman from NYCB played the tinkling notes of the concerto, you could almost hear the Stalin regime shattering like glass ornaments.
Tsypin's most delicious comment was the inclusion of one very large red hex nut right in the middle of the hanging collection with some other little red hex nuts off to the side. Please, oh please change those to wingnuts for the political beauty of it all. But, wait, that might offend the world premiere's Leading Underwriter, David Koch, the ultimate right wingnut.
All of the dancing was quite wonderful. Symphony #9 was led by Roberto Bolle, Veronika Part, Jared Matthews, Stella Abrera, and Sascha Radetsky. This piece premiered last fall at City Center and seems to have undergone some changes or perhaps just adaptations to the Met stage. The costumes of the principals no longer have what originally appeared to be faces that were too obscured to be identified by the audience last fall.
Chamber Symphony was led by Sarah Lane, Yuriko Kajiya, Hee Seo, and James Whiteside. It was very odd to see this piece which contained several bits of humor played out in front of the backdrop based on the Filonov painting. Filonov suffered terribly and nearly starved to death rather than sell his paintings to private collectors. He wanted them displayed in museums and in shows for everyone to see, but since he was on the Stalin regime's ever-growing List of Unpopular Artists, he wasn't able to do so. In this ballet, Whiteside seemingly was an unappealing outcast who suffered some emotional torment as he tried to persuade each of the three women to choose him. He lost all of them. In the end, he stood in front of a large collection of couples in various poses, motioned for them to come together like a conductor motions the orchestra to ready itself, and then he walked down the middle of them and walked away. It's a ballet that requires notes in the program. The average audience member isn't going to research Filonov or his paintings or make any connection between the male figure and either Filonov or Shostakovich.
The third ballet of the trilogy, Piano Concerto #1, was led by Xiomara Reyes & Daniil Simkin and Christine Schevchenko (replacing Gillian Murphy) & Calvin Royal. If Symphony #9 was the troubling part of the trilogy and Chamber Symphony was the misery and sadness part, then PC#1 must have been the happy, optimistic, things-are-changing-in-the-old-country finale. It, like the other two ballets, crammed a lot of steps into the music and the pace of it all got a little tiring.
What is there to say about the steps? They looked pretty much the same in all three ballets. That's not to suggest that they were unpleasant, but it was exhausting to watch so many steps on top of the short ultra-note-y, reiterative music of Shostakovich. There were some clever images created by the dancers, such as in the final ballet when the two ladies in red leotards struck some lovely, very long, curving attitudes that brought to mind the Soviet sickle.
So here we are once again at the bottom line together. And you want to know whether Haglund liked the Shostakovich Trilogy. Did he like seeing it once? Yes! Does he want to see it again? Nnnnnnn . . . . maybe.
The Pump Bump Award, a pair of hex nut stilettos, goes to scenery designer George Tsypin for hitting the nail on the head with his tools and hardware.