Arts & Culture Blog

Arts & Culture Blog

The Monterey Symphony and the American Ballet Shared the Stage in Salinas and Carmel

The fusion of classic music and pop music, purist artistry and American swing, can work really well. George Gershwin himself embodies some of the best of that overlap—as in the stunning and gorgeous and swinging classical/jazz hybrid of "Rhapsody in Blue." And when legendary choreographer George Balanchine first conceived the Gershwin pieces for the American Ballet Theater in the 1930's, it must have carried with it the revelation of newness.

But at Saturday's opening performance at Steinbeck Institute of the Performing Arts, the combination of traditional but slightly jazzy ballet by four dancers from the prestigious ABT dance company, and a symphonic take on Gershwin's Tin Pan Alley and Great American Songbook numbers, seemed anachronistic. The music, by itself, was classy and fun, executed with a satisfying mix of restraint and exuberance, a big, complex voice used effectively. (The drum kit was a sweet sight and sound.)

But the dancing was, first of all, seriously constricted by the thin strip of stage that was left over for them by the presence of the big symphony orchestra, which forced the dancers to navigate not only in a relatively narrow side-to-side swathe, but to also make adjustments to not crash into each other or the conductor. It was like losing one of the planes on a 3D grid. In addition to the stage restrictions, the content has not aged well, especially in the torrents and rivulets contemporary dance has poured forth. The dancing was traditional ballet. With ears closed, there might have been few instances that visually, alone, hinted at jazz. One piece, danced by Julio-Bragado Young, was the most jazzed up of the lot (and there were a lot of songs), but even that contained moments that resembled a confusing clash of an elegant dancer pantomiming a wiseguy. Though the dancers kept time, the connection between the music and the dance seemed coincidental instead of essential to each other.

The symphony tried something new with the first half of the program in this their second performance of the new season, and they got dancers from ABT to collaborate with them, and both counts are admirably impressive. The infusion of jazz music into parts of the last Carmel Bach Festival was not universally accepted or appreciated.

The second half of the Monterey Symphony's program, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 2, dubbed "Little Russian," was universally accepted and appreciated by the audience. It was traditional symphony fare and it worked beautifully. The orchestra, sprinkled with players from Youth Music Monterey, was conducted with controlled vigor by Bragado-Darman, and shined especially on the simple and insistent melody of the second movement, teased out in diverse high-contrasts across different sets of instruments. In recordings, other symphonies have played this one subtly, but here the evocative piece sounded like a grandiose score to a victorious battle. The final movement, no. 4, with its many sets of false crescendoes and rising din of music, its revisitations of previous motifs (except, sadly, that movement 2 passage) and its furiously working strings, brought the house down, and the audience up for standing applause. Nice save.