Sunday 19 June 2016

Hell Hath No Fury

I thought the classic Shakespearean line, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" would make an admirable opening gambit for this review.  Imagine my amusement when I looked it up and found out that the ACTUAL line was written by William Congreve, and runs like this:

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned."

It's still an excellent opening.  After seeing the latest remounting of the famous Romantic ballet Giselle  by the National Ballet, the figure I can't get out of my mind is not so much the heroine but the iron-willed, implacable Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis.

For those not familiar with the story: Giselle is a peasant girl, who falls in love with a man she knows as Loys (he's really Albrecht, a nobleman in disguise).  When Giselle discovers that Albrecht is already engaged to his social equal, Bathilde, she dances a magnificent mad scene and then kills herself.  She is then buried in the forest, not in the hallowed ground of a churchyard.  After death, her spirit joins the Wilis, the unquiet spirits of women jilted by their lovers, whose Queen has sworn to have her revenge by forcing all men they encounter to dance without ceasing until they die.

An interesting challenge for a stage performer, to lock the face into a single rock-solid expression of frozen rage and keep it like that for the entire performance.  And that's what Myrtha has to do.

Well, more on her in a minute.  First, though, the music.  Adolphe Adam's fine score is one of the key reasons why Giselle has held the stage where many of its contemporaries have not.  Adam, better known as the composer of the Cantique de Noel (O Holy Night) has here begun to experiment with the concept of attaching a melodic idea to a particular character -- the concept that Wagner would later bring to full life in his mature music dramas (Giselle was created at the same time that Wagner was beginning work on Tannhauser).  Adam's score is really one of the first symphonic ballets, making extensive use of the expressive possibilities in all departments of the orchestra.  It's not by accident that you hear in this music foreshadowings of Tchaikovsky.  It's also music of considerable technical skill and originality.

The choreography of the National Ballet's version, created by Sir Peter Wright, respects the significant history of this work.  It's a key turning point in the art of the ballet, both because it is one of the earliest ballets to place the female dancers en pointe and because it creates, in Albrecht, a male lead who is a true character, not just a convenient pair of hands to lift his partner.

The story, too, is a timeless one.  The characters can be and have been portrayed in different ways, and driven by different motivations.  At bottom, though, what you have here is a love story that crosses social class lines and cuts across social conventions, with disastrous results.  In that respect, it's not unlike Romeo and Juliet.  We know Albrecht will marry Bathilde because society demands that he marry his social equal.  Like many a man in the bad old days of arranged marriage, though, he really loves Giselle, the woman he can't marry -- a fact which becomes abundantly clear in the second act of the ballet.

The role of Giselle herself has often been described as "the ballerina's Hamlet" and it's an apt metaphor indeed.  The dancer has to begin as a light-hearted, playful girl, and then evolve quickly through shock and horror into the mad scene.  After her death, she has to become an ethereal shade, yet still be capable of feeling and expressing love -- since it is her loving assistance that enables Albrecht to defy the Wilis until the sun rises, breaking their power.  Also, like Hamlets, there are as many different interpretations of Giselle as there are dancers taking the role.

In this run of seven performances, the company has cast no less than six different Giselles!  While I would have loved to have seen another one or two, I had to settle for just the one at hand -- Elena Lobsanova.  Hers was a remarkable performance.  Consider that mad scene.  In the past, it's often been seized as a cue for all kinds of melodramatic excesses (probably how it was originally performed).  Lobsanova's madness was much more inward, subtly delineated in face and gesture but without histrionics -- and all the more moving for that.  When she began slowly and hesitantly, to dance to a quiet fragmentary reminiscence of her earlier love theme I found my eyes growing wet.  In the second act she was effortlessly ethereal, her arm movements in particular much softer and gentler than before,  This was a deeply thought and deeply felt portrayal of the character.

Her Albrecht was Naoya Ebe.  It seems almost superfluous to comment on Ebe's technique.  High flying leaps and rapid turns, all precisely executed, are his trademark.  What struck me here was how much he delved into the character in Act 1, portraying the different aspects of Albrecht in a way that invited us to ponder what was driving this man.  His Act 2 pas de deux with Giselle was infused with love.  At the end, when he starts to walk with her only to have her finally slip away from him, the look of heartbreak on his face broke my heart too.

Hilarion, the forester who also loves Giselle, can sometimes come in as an also-ran.  Skylar Campbell, in his debut in this role, made much more of him.  Expressive face and gesture alike are critical to this man's role in the story, and we got these things loud and clear.  Equally clear was his exhaustion in his dance of death when he falls into the clutches of the Wilis in Act 2.

The role of Myrtha is also a testing role for a ballerina, in a quite different way.  Not only must she maintain that iron face and (more challenging) a similar rock-solid physicality, but she has to do some technically difficult dancing at the same time.  At the beginning of Act 2, she has to glide slowly across the stage, perfectly erect, perfectly poised, apparently drifting on mist -- moving all the way en pointe.  The least quivering or unsteadiness will destroy the illusion of this ghostly spirit floating above the ground.  Hannah Fischer, also making her role debut, did all of this and more.

It's a pity that the curtain calls at the end of the ballet feature only the dancers seen in Act 2.  I say that because the quartet who portrayed Giselle's Friends in Act 1 were very much more than also-rans, and deserve praise for the energy and joy they brought to their featured solos and duos:  Jordana Daumec, Chelsey Meiss, Ethan Watts and Giorgio Galli.  Daumec and Meiss also doubled as Moyna and Zulme, the two lead Wilis, in Act 2.

Also deserving of more than a passing mention was the precision of the corps de ballet in the Act 2 "white scene" -- as neatly done as I have ever seen it.  Certainly, the corps earned the cheers which came their way at the final curtain!

It seems superfluous to mention that the National Ballet orchestra under David Briskin played with all their usual verve and panache.  Musically, though, it's worth noting the careful balance of the bass-heavy brass chords at the beginning of Act 2, chords which can easily degenerate into mere congested noise.

Like Hamlet with which it is so often compared, Giselle is an endlessly intriguing challenge to each new generation of dancers and of audiences too.  This performance was notable for the particular strengths that the leads each brought to their roles, as much as for the subtlety which they also built into their interpretations.

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