Metropolitan Classical Ballet New & Reviews

Posted on Wed., Sep. 14, 2005

Triumphant return for ballet

By Wayne Lee Gay
Star-Telegram Dance Critic

Fort Worth - In 1946, a Russian choreographer and a German composer collaborated to create a ballet masterpiece joining physicality and spirituality on an unprecedented level.

On Tuesday, that masterpiece -- Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, with music by Paul Hindemith -- provided Metropolitan Classical Ballet with a major triumph as the Arlington-based company returned to Bass Performance Hall.

The sleek black-and-white ballet, inspired by medieval metaphysics, only hints at emotions and moods, avoids drama and, nearly 60 years after its debut, continues to challenge and enlighten the viewer with its fluid union of body and soul.

Although there's no room for stars or scene stealers in The Four Temperaments, this company, drawn from Europe and America and meticulously trained by Paul Mejia, a Balanchine protege and company co-director, created a sense of constant intensity. Conductor Ron Spigelman accomplished the daunting task of finding the emotional edge in this magnificent score for piano and strings while successfully holding a complex ballet together.

The evening, a miniature lesson in ballet history, opened with the pas de six from French choreographer Arthur Saint-Leon's Markitenka of 1844, staged by company co-director and Bolshoi star Alexander Vetrov. Although obviously a work of its time, the piece drew, in its stylized abstraction, a striking parallel to Balanchine's work of a century later and underlined the remarkable range of this small but ambitious company.

Michel Fokin's Le Spectre de la Rose, created as a showpiece for Nijinsky in 1911, provided a meaty role for Anton Korsakov, who danced with appropriately Nijinskylike edge and decadence. Olga Pavlova and Andrey Prikhodko explored the psychology of two of Shakespeare's great characters in Mejia's Hamlet, set to Tchaikovsky's tone poem, and here enhanced with Tony Tucci's lighting, which created a giant chessboard across which Hamlet and Ophelia moved as pawns of fate.

GRADE: A