On opening night at the Wang Theatre last Thursday, the company looked wellprepared for both the peasant revelry in the first act and the implacable rituals of the Wilis in the second act. Kathleen Breen Combes made an impressive debut in the difficult role of Myrtha, queen of the Wilis, who rules the forest with unearthly gliding bourrées and gravityless jumps. Myrtha must be completely authoritative, merciless in demanding the death of all males intruding on her domain; yet she has no “acting” to do except for a few imperious gestures.
Contrasting with the extended pas de deux of Giselle and Albrecht in the last act, the Peasant Pas de Deux is a bravura entertainment at the first-act harvest festival. Misa Kuranaga and Joel Prouty were wonderful in this showpiece, exemplars perhaps of the glamorous classical style that followed ballet Romanticism.
Opening-night leads Larissa Ponomarenko and Roman Rykine demonstrated beautiful line and technical command, but as characters they seemed molded out of enamel, fixed in the contrasting attitudes of before and after the betrayal. In addition to their fixed expressive states, they also preserved some lingering affectations that must have been injected into Giselle by other dancers.
The most disturbing of these relics were the exaggeratedly slow tempi taken by Jonathan McPhee and the orchestra when Albrecht first encountered Giselle’s spirit near her forest grave. The super-adagio, later attenuated even further in a duet with deathly ritardandi, turned the dances into stunts of endurance. This musical distortion was first done, I think, by Natalia Makarova, but no one since has been able to sustain the aethereal quality she was able to create.
Related:
Dreaming and remembrance, Love and death, Not quite Nina, More 
- Dreaming and remembrance
Two momentous revivals in town showed us how big the category of classical ballet really is.
- Love and death
“Classic Balanchine” as opposed to . . . “Jazz Balanchine”? “Porno Balanchine”? What was the alternative?
- Not quite Nina
On hearing the opening notes of the Kronos Quartet composition and seeing the dancers lit in sunny yellow, I feared we were about to be subjected to one of those “up with people” ballets.
- Scenes from the city
I missed more things in two and a half days last week than I managed to take in, so whatever I might infer about dance in the New York vortex could have come out a different way if I’d reversed my priorities.
- Links to a legacy
In her Pillow Talk at Jacob’s Pillow last weekend, Suzanne Farrell was asked what she expects of the young dancers who are reviving George Balanchine’s ballets under her direction.
- State of the art
Maybe it’s the economy, but Boston Ballet’s third-annual season-opening gala was a sober evening, without the orchestral overture that graced the first two affairs.
- Smaller is better
Next fall, Boston Ballet will move all its performing operations to the Opera House from Citi Performing Arts Center's immense and unfriendly Wang Theatre.
- Not so great
Way back in 1977, PBS gave us a Nutcracker with a difference: Mikhail Baryshnikov as an electrifying Nutcracker/Cavalier and willowy Gelsey Kirkland as an older-than-usual Clara, as the Sugar Plum Fairy.
- Adam and Eve
A day at New York City Ballet that starts with a matinee of Coppélia and ends with a Balanchine evening might seem to offer merely the contrast between classic and modern, old and new.
- Dancing ballet or not
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's Celebrity Series program at the Cutler Majestic last weekend could have been a primer of the ways not to dance ballet.
- Crowning glory
In 1967, George Balanchine created Jewels for New York City Ballet, and in short order this evening-length triptych — Emeralds , Rubies , and Diamonds — became the crown jewel of 20th-century dance.
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Dance
, Entertainment, Sergei Prokofiev, Alicia Markova, More
, Entertainment, Sergei Prokofiev, Alicia Markova, Darci Kistler, Galina Ulanova, Joaquin De Luz, Maina Gielgud, Peter Farmer, School of American Ballet, The Metropolitan Opera, Less
