Ménage à trois

Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert Dance, must take responsibility for most of the good times I’ve had recently, midwife to a litter of excellent things born out of curiosity and an unfussed love of culture, particularly music. A true artistic director (cf my complaint last time).

On to the creative table at Rambert HQ this year he has thrown ideas about brass bands, a Picasso painting, something challengingly old-school for the Rambert orchestra to play, a new commissioned score or two, a bold, even foolhardy, decision to declare the Rolling Stones passé and say goodbye to Christopher Bruce’s popular but now irredeemably dated Rooster.

Much intelligent trust lay behind Baldwin’s commissions to Kim Brandstrup and Didy Veldman, unveiled over the past month. To one he offered a master score — Schoenberg’s 1899 Verklärte Nacht — to the other a master painting — Picasso’s 1925 ‘The Three Dancers’. While obviously there’d be homework for the audience, the projects were helpfully linked. Both score and picture have tragic love triangles implicated in their subject, so comparison was inevitable when they were premièred in Salford and at Sadler’s Wells this month.

Brandstrup romps away with full honours. His Transfigured Night is a haunting, emotionally piercing masterpiece, one of the finest that this outstanding choreographer has ever made, the reward of maturity. He reworks Schoenberg’s original inspiration, Richard Dehmel’s poem about a woman who tells her lover she is pregnant by another man, into a three-part imagining of the outcome. First, the confrontation and her rejection by the horrified man; then, the dream of might-have-been; finally, the future, in which we’re invited to speculate that the man’s need of the woman may manage to overcome his sense of betrayal, for the moment.

What works well on the page doesn’t always translate, but Brandstrup has a masterly eye for space, a painter’s eye, or a film director’s.