norman lebrecht<\/p>\n
May 31, 2026<\/p>\n
From our distinguished critic in residence, Alastair Macaulay visiting New York\u2026\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I:\u00a0 Hilary Hahn plays Lalo at New York City Ballet<\/p>\n
The American star violinist Hilary Hahn, after a recurrent upper-body injury and surgery, has returned to playing \u2013 in no uncertain terms.\u00a0 As a guest with New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, she has been playing Edouard Lalo\u2019s five-movement \u201cSymphonie espagnole\u201d:\u00a0 which, despite its title, is really a violin concerto calling for almost nonstop solo-violin playing, with demanding virtuosity.\u00a0 Lalo (1823-1892) was one of several French composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bizet, Chabrier, Massenet, Ravel) who composed a work in vividly Spanish style, with Spanish rhythms, colours, and intensity adding all kinds of atmospheric spice.\u00a0 Hahn\u2019s playing \u2013 I caught two performances \u2013 was not only brilliant (passagework galore) but lustrous, with gorgeous depths of mellow tone.<\/p>\n
New York City Ballet has plenty of violin concertos in its repertory \u2013 including ones by Bach, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Barber, plus Ravel\u2019s \u201cTzigane\u201d.\u00a0 And, though it has sometimes invited guests to play the solo parts, it usually calls on its own orchestral members for concerti.\u00a0 The visit of a major star such as Hahn comes therefore as a happy surprise.<\/p>\n
No ballet company has a musical repertory to match City Ballet\u2019s. Conductor Andrew Litton, though he is not an instinctive dance accompanist, has done much over a dozen years to transform its orchestral playing, making it fuller in tone, with string portamenti often adding Romantic nuance. As the company\u2019s founder-choreographer George Balanchine always wanted, you can close your eyes and still have an excellent time.<\/p>\n
The idea of inviting Hahn to play this score here originated with the multifaceted ballerina Tiler Peck, who has newly choreographed this Lalo score.\u00a0 (Lalo\u2019s music is unknown in many quarters, but his \u201cNamouna\u201d has been a recurrent item in City Ballet\u2019s repertory since the creation of Alexei Ratmansky\u2019s ballet of that name in 2010.) Peck \u2013 no relation to the company\u2019s resident choreographer Justin Peck \u2013 is an experienced international virtuoso dancer, in her mid-thirties, who has presented her own troupe on tour at Sadler\u2019s Wells and elsewhere.\u00a0 In recent years, she has also taken up choreography; this Lalo symphony was her second creation for City Ballet. (On Thursday 28 May, she also won an Emmy for a new documentary, \u201cTiler Peck: Suspending Time\u201d.)<\/p>\n
Her \u201cSymphonie espagnole\u201d is a thoroughly professional job, introducing different dancers for each of the music\u2019s first four movements, showing how many of ballet\u2019s structural devices she understands, until she fills the stage with her massed forces for the final movement.\u00a0 Pretty to the eye, this \u201cSymphonie\u201d is also neat to the ear.<\/p>\n
Even so, it feels regrettably superficial, not least in its ideas of Spanishness.\u00a0 A Haba\u00f1era is an intoxicating rhythm: but Peck\u2019s Haba\u00f1era \u2013 the symphony\u2019s fourth movement \u2013 never begins to intoxicate. Instead it becomes a glamorous showcase for men, especially for Ryan Tomash, the company\u2019s handsome new Canadian guest.\u00a0 His big sweepings of arms and upper legs never catching the Haba\u00f1era\u2019s insidious lilt (which derives from the one short beat before its three longer ones).<\/p>\n
Peck does have good taste in dancers.\u00a0 Thoughout \u201cSymphonie espagnole\u201d, she generously draws the audience\u2019s attention to several of the company\u2019s younger luminaries \u2013 not just Tomash, the admirable and fleet Emma von Enck, Indiana Woodward, Tomash, David Gabriel, but also such otherwise little-spotted artists as Ruby Lister and Kloe Walker, both of whom claim space in a big way. Peck gives them all opportunities that make you long to know more of them.<\/p>\n
Everyone \u2013 rightly \u2013 is talking of Mira Nadon, who is, with Chloe Misseldine (American Ballet Theatre), one of New York\u2019s two most oustanding younger ballerinas: Peck has cast her in both the Scherzando second moment and (second cast) in the andante fourth. Nadon has purity, beauty, and naturalness; she\u2019s likely to prove the company\u2018\u2019s (perhaps the world\u2019s) most enthralling exemplum of classical radiance since the great Kyra Nichols.<\/p>\n
\u201cSymphonie espagnole\u201d certainly sends the City Ballet audience out happy \u2013 and it improves on repeated viewing. Yet it doesn\u2019t dig deep into its music.\u00a0 Peck has constructed it, skilfully, from known ballet effects (even quoting the most hackneyed of mock-Spanish ballets, \u201cDon Quixote\u201d) rather than trying to take choreography where it has not been before.<\/p>\n
II:\u00a0 \u00a0Other repertory at New York City Ballet<\/p>\n
This May, that Peck premiere shared a triple bill programme with another work by a woman choreographer, \u201cStandard Deviation\u201d, made for the company in 2023 by the Canadian Alysa Pires (pronounced like the plural of Pyre). This work uses a commissioned score by the Australian composer Jack Frerer.\u00a0 Frerer has made other more appealing scores, but Pires connects to this one in ways that make it eloquently strange and dramatic.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s more original than Peck in her deployment of body language, of male-female cooperation, and of ensemble organisation.\u00a0 (It\u2019s good news to hear that she\u2019ll make a second work for City Ballet in the 2026-2027 season.) She uses Von Enck as a compellingly fast soloist but also with emphatically knotted leg and arm positions \u2013 a fascinatingly complex dance character \u2013 whereas Victor Abreu and Naomi Corti are featured as a fascinatingly symbiotic pair.\u00a0 (Abreu is turned by Corti while he holds an firmly sculptural arabesque).\u00a0 Throughout the corps (six male-female couples), Pires shows a striking sense of human variety (several dancers are given solo opportunities), even while her ensembles are geometrically arresting.<\/p>\n
That programme opened with Jerome Robbins\u2019s \u201cOpus 19: The Dreamer\u201d, set to Prokofiev\u2019s first violin concerto: a ballet I\u2019ve watched with many casts since it was new in 1979.\u00a0 (The Royal Ballet briefly danced it in 1986.) The central \u201cdreamer\u201d role was made for Mikhail Baryshnikov; Robbins caught a restless, searching energy in Baryshnikov that has stimulated many subsequent men since then. The ballerina role, made for Patricia McBride, is that of a difficult muse, tempestuous and yet inspiring, often eluding the hero but finally settling into a rich symmetry with him. (Interestingly, Robbins keeps changing the numbers of corps dancers around and behind this couple. The effect heightens the ballet\u2019s mystery.)\u00a0 Joseph Gordon, a beauty with an poetic command of adagio rare in American ballet, deserves all praise as the leading man, while Alexa Maxwell plays his female counterpart with a thrilling blend of decisiveness and unknowability.<\/p>\n
City Ballet\u2019s repertory has been marvellously varied this May.\u00a0 The one full-length ballet has been its 1974 production of \u201cCopp\u00e9lia\u201d, directed by Balanchine and his long-term colleague Alexandra Danilova, with Acts One and Two largely along the lines of Marius Petipa\u2019s 1884 St Petersburg production, and with new dances by Balanchine for most of Act Three.\u00a0 The story of \u201cCopp\u00e9lia\u201d may be slight, but at least it\u2019s unusual among nineteenth-century ballets in having its heroine taking charge of matters and sorting out the delusions of its two main men \u2013 her boyfriend Franz and the Pygmalion-fantasist Dr Copp\u00e9lius.\u00a0 When the production was young, it had an incomparable Copp\u00e9lius in Shaun O\u2019Brien; but none of his current successors, even the often superb actor Robert La Fosse, has begun to show the role\u2019s darkness or its pathos.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve seen all the company\u2019s four Swanildas. The most applauded has been Megan Fairchild, a dancer so youthful and popular that I\u2019m sorry to record that I find her performance vapid. Tiler Peck\u2019s interpretation, by contrast, is too calculating and too sly. Fortunately Indiana Woodward plays the role with really haunting ebullience \u2013 all her muscles seem to have inner springs \u2013 so that the story becomes a large human exploration of space, time, and humanity.\u00a0 Better yet is Von Enck, petite but long-legged, coolly elegant and charming but with delicious touches of verve and attack: where most Swanildas are lovably knowable, Von Enck is enchantingly unknowable.<\/p>\n
Woodward is also splendid in the central role of Balanchine\u2019s 1956 sublime \u201cDivertimento no 15\u201d, surrounded by such junior ballerinas as Emily Kikta, Sara Adams, and Ashley Laracey matching her in high refinement of classical style.\u00a0 \u00a0(One longs for Von Enck to join this ballet.) In \u201cDivertimento no 15\u201d, Mozart\u2019s brio and \u00e9lan meet their dance counterparts on levels where forms meet forms, and where rhythms answer rhythms.\u00a0 \u00a0We\u2019re watching Platonic ideals, it seems, moving in serene harmony.<\/p>\n
III:\u00a0 \u00a0The New York Public Library\u2019s Martha Graham exhibition<\/p>\n
There has been a New York Public Library for the performing arts at Lincoln Center since 1965.\u00a0 A haven for all who love the history of the performing arts, its dance collections are especially fine.\u00a0\u00a0(And bewilderingly capacious.)\u00a0 This May, it has opened a centenary exhibition of America\u2019s oldest company, the Martha Graham Dance Company.<\/p>\n
Yes, Martha Graham started her company as a regular enterprise in 1926.\u00a0 This exhibition shows how she taught and coached others \u2013 and how she spoke about dance. You see excellent silent films \u2013 and marvellous photogrpahs \u2013 from the 1930s and 1940s that document Graham dramatising space alone or interacting onstage with her early all-female colleagues.\u00a0 Her stillnesses, her falls, her shudders all still have staggering intensity after almost a century.\u00a0 Her sculptural fullness and her rhythmic acuity are the quintessence of modernism in motion.<\/p>\n
When she is seen beside such male colleagues as Erick Hawkins and Merce Cunningham, she takes her essentially feminist drama to new subtleties and complexities \u2013 though it may be said that Graham was nonetheless at her greatest before she admitted men to her company in 1937, when her own physicality was at its most astounding, and when her heroic world of women without men was indeed a world.\u00a0 Even when I was first watching the Graham company in the 1970s, when Graham was alive, it was true that only a few subsequent members of her company knew how to make her dramas fresh.\u00a0 Too many Graham heroines now look like bad Joan Crawford.\u00a0 But to watch Graham herself again, when she was breaking new ground: this, in film and in photographs, remains tremendous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"norman lebrecht May 31, 2026 From our distinguished critic in residence, Alastair Macaulay visiting New York\u2026\u00a0\u00a0 I:\u00a0 Hilary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249293,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[97407,1121,97406,47030,9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-249292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-alysa-pires","tag-ballet","tag-hilary-hahn","tag-martha-graham","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}