The last premiere of this year’s State Opera season, which was dedicated to the ballet evening “Tänze Bilder Sinfonie”, took place on the stage of the Haus am Ring with great jubilation. As with the virtual premiere “Mahler, live” in December, Martin Schläpfer, the new head of ballet, has designed an evening for the entire Vienna State Ballet, i.e. for 98 dancers listed in the program booklet.
This impresses and creates many possibilities from the intimate solo to the amazing tutti. What the three selected pieces of music had in common is that they are not actually designed for dance and yet contain a lot of rhythm, even dance. It started with the “Symphony in Three Movements”, which George Balanchine created with the New York City Ballet as part of a Stravinsky Festival in 1972, concentrating entirely on the rhythmic and tonal strengths of this work. As a typical black-and-white ballet with pink dots of color, the 20 minutes of music manage without a stage set, and yet the music that was created immediately after the Second World War and in a certain way refers to it generates images that transform the balanchine into fascinating movement patterns converted and the Vienna State Ballet implemented impressively no less skillfully – rehearsed under Ben Huys.
From a purely acoustic point of view, Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” was a strong contrast, because it was not one of the orchestral versions that sounded, but the pianistic original played brilliantly by Alina Bercu. For this purpose, the former artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, Alexei Ratmansky, created a staging and choreography inspired by Wassili Kandinsky’s pictures, which does not attempt to illustrate Viktor Hartmann’s original pictures with dance, but rather from the music and again strongly from the rhythm starting with abstract lines to create new thought patterns and fictional visions. Five pairs of soloists studied by Amar Ramasar, who was part of the premiere ensemble, meet as soloists, in a pas de deux, in an ensemble, in order to let these fantasies become reality in dance, and impressed not only technically, but also in their flexibility, despite the same costumes Design of the individual “pictures”.
Impressive from the ballet director
The final point was a world premiere by Martin Schläpfer, who after “Mahler” not simply “danced” another symphony, but turned its innermost outward and let it react subtly to the composition. The 15th Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich is ideally suited for this, as it is something like a kaleidoscope of the entire music of the Russian composer with all the biographical ups and downs.
Not only do I use my own quotes, but also those from Rossini and Wagner. Schläpfer has developed an impressive choreography here and the Vienna State Opera Ballet interpreted it completely convincingly – the slow second movement is particularly impressive, but also the melancholy of the last, but by no means hopelessly ending fourth movement.
Robert Reimer, who found ideal access to both symphonies, was new to the podium of the highly precise and committed State Opera Orchestra. (wruss)
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