Gusto galore from Boston Ballet

Those who lament sluggishness in contemporary stagings of Balanchine’s ballets — and those who are responsible for it — should have seen and learnt from Boston Ballet last week. Forget the funereal tempi we, in the old world, are forced to accept because of the killjoy aesthetics favoured by artistically challenged ballet directors and teachers. Boston Ballet’s Serenade had all one would wish for: quick, sparkling tempi, a splendid use of the space, majestic flow and gusto galore. It’s true that precision might have gone astray now and then, but never in a major way; besides, real artistry has always had little to do with precision.

What I particularly enjoyed was the way the brilliant dancing highlighted in full the subtle nuances and shadings that underscore the ballet. The carefully balanced mixture of joy and impending doom — there are references to the Angel of Death, and the final image is of a flight towards a better world — came fully to the fore, eliciting a well-deserved thunderous ovation at the end.

The same could be said of the other Balanchine work on the same programme, the intriguing Symphony in Three Movements. Set to Stravinsky’s infectious music, this work stands out for a number of not exactly balletic ideas entwined in a movement vocabulary that mixes successfully sport, athletics and classical dance. The result is pleasantly exhilarating, even though there are strokes of agony and competitive tension tucked behind its ‘funny’ side. Here, too, the fizzy artistry of the company worked like a charm, in the same way it had worked earlier on in Plan to B — a superb, fast-paced and visually mesmerising creation by Jorma Elo that I hope to see again very soon.

I wish I were equally enthusiastic about the staging of Nijinsky’s celebrated 1912 Après-midi d’un Faune — retitled here Afternoon of a Faun, which is a tad misleading, as the English title traditionally indicates the splendid modern ballet reading that Jerome Robbins created in 1953.