Balanchine: Three Signature Works: boggle-eyed museum pieces that spark fitfully to life

Telegraph

29-03-2025

Georgiy Melitonovich Balanchivadze – George Balanchine to the world – was the Russian-born choreographer of Georgian descent who gave the US its own lofty, leggy, sparkling strain of neo-classical ballet. He had an astonishing eye for choreographic geometry, while being perhaps counterintuitively flexible in terms of how he created his pieces. Just an 'awkward' 17 people in the studio today? Piece of cake – 17 it is. And oh, someone's now turned up late? Marvellous! Let's work that in too.
Much like Britain's own sublimely musical genius-in-residence – his direct contemporary Frederick Ashton – Balanchine (1904-1983) is extremely difficult to dance: there is generally nowhere to 'hide' when performing his work. His tendency towards minimalist abstraction – with simple leotards and tutus, bare stages and plain cycloramas – means that only seldom will 'acting' will get you anywhere; technique and presentational star-power are all.
A glaring exception to that rule about lack of narrative – in terms of Balanchine's surviving ballets, at least – is The Prodigal Son (1929), the centrepiece of the Royal Ballet's impeccably-chosen triple helping of Mr B, which closes this year's London-wide Dance Reflections festival. Not danced by the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in more than 20 years, his final work for the Ballets Russes tells the famous New Testament story of the boy who leaves home with everything, is seduced and robbed, and finally returns home to his forgiving pa.
Seen today, it comes across as a fascinating, boggle-eyed museum piece, the fauvist melodrama of steps and plot alike seeming to cascade down from Georges Roualt's school-of-Derain backcloth. Here, neo-classicism is almost entirely spurned for an often coarse, repeatedly 'line'-shattering physical vocabulary more of a kind with earlier, more famous Ballets Russes ventures such as 1913's The Rite of Spring.
Time hasn't been entirely kind to it, even if Balanchine's choreographic inventiveness is everywhere – what presumably widened eyes in 1929 Paris looks almost quaint now. Moreover, the Father calls to mind Dumbledore, while the vividly etched pack of grotesque hangers-on seem close to the post-apocalyptic War Boys from the recent Mad Max adventures.
Still, it's fascinating to hear Prokofiev cutting his already-sharp teeth as a composer of ballet music, while Cesar Corrales is a deranged but disciplined knockout as the Son, and on Friday night the work's 40 minutes whizzed by. A big disappointment, though, is Natalia Osipova's Siren, full of pelvis-jutting insolence, but absolutely not the irresistibly lithe reptile who leads the boy from the straight path.
In marked contrast, the two works that here flank Prodigal Son – 1934's Serenade (set to Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings) and 1947's Symphony in C (to Bizet) – have dated not one jot; no modishly outré 1920s designs or drama here, and golly, how unshackled Balanchine seems to feel once he steps away from narrative.
Of the Royal Ballet's renderings of both works on Friday night, my thoughts are very similar. Lauren Cuthbertson stood out in the earlier piece, Vadim Muntagirov and Reece Clarke in the latter: both projected across the stalls as if to the manor born. But the Royal Ballet seemed to lack the technical strength-in-depth, the complete, insouciant mastery of Balanchine's grand style, to make either Serenade's sublime mystery or Symphony's company-showpiece bravura really fly. Bad collective performances? No. But this wonderful troupe can, and should, do better.