The Vienna state ballet in Madrid: Coreutic obsolescence and musical redemption | Culture

Can you get out of a theater with broken wings, the mood for soils and lost hopes? Can. And it shouldn’t be. To those who love and defend the Great Ballet, they must have seemed a discouraging effort. The applause were warm, there was an air of confusion; In everyone’s minds there was another expectation.

Although the theater titular orchestra made an effort that must be recognized for entering into depth in complex sonorities, being involved in the two musical pieces of such a diverse style, despite the delicacy of broadcasting of the Soprano Marina Monzó with solvency and acting modes, and even taking into account the own quality and demonstrated of a high number of the dancers, the function of the state ballet of Vienna has been a failure; Until now, the most popular in dance and ballet of who has scheduled the Royal Theater since its reopening. It is pertinent to ask: Did the programmers really see that routine and mechanical way of dancing Concertantefrom Van Manen, adding the crazy dimensions of the fee on the fourth symphony of Mahler de Schläpfer?

In his previous two visits to the Royal Theater, Wiener Staatsballett left a magnificent impression and was justified. First in 2000 with Manon by Kenneth Macmillan (directed by Renato Zanella) and in 2017 with The privateer . Today almost erases us yesterday.

Inconsistent, with the disoriented template and clearly without motivations or thrust, both Van Manehen’s work and Schläpfer’s penetrated, shameful narcissism and greater glory of himself, have left a taste of bitter mouth, almost poverty, and that is never a receipt, and less in the case of one of the most significant and respected opera and ballet theaters of the world. In his role as Viennese Ballet Director, and that is what has precipitated his departure. Many times we must leave at home our most throbbing fueros to adapt to whoever receives us; It is called professional reverence. On September 1 he takes over in Vienna (Milan, 1963), in whom all hopes of revitalization and resurrection of the Austrian holding team are placed.

It is not only that the choreography of Schläpfer is little stimulating, but that it is an out of place that already marked the descent of the set from its discussed premiere of 2020. The symphonic ballet is not a tailor drawer that endures everything they throw; He had its splendor in the 30s and 40s of the twentieth century to Massine, Balanchine held it in its own way, enjoyed enhancement and new works, and that is the stage that Schläpfer himself lived. The task of bringing to the dance scene complete symphonies is always a titanic act, so it is scarce.

This Mahler’s symphony is perhaps the least danceable of his whole corpus symphonic. Almost 60 dancers dressed in ridiculous clothes wake up and wander with ridiculous clothes without knowing very well what to do. They come in, leave, they are held, but nothing artistic or merit happens. Monumentality becomes empty.

Of all the great composers, Mahler and; But fate punished them both, and every day somewhere in the orb there is a choreographer by assembling his doll with his music that, effectively and with great evidence, they are not made for dance; Some Wagnerian pieces and others by Mahler too, tolerate the coreutic quadrature, but they are the least, and for that it is necessary to be Béjart, Neumeier or Petit. That all music has a dance inside is still a pseudoromantic cursilad Sixth Symphony of Beethoven. This fourth symphony that decided to use Schläpfer is, for Mahler, his way, his Pastoral (It was already misunderstood both in its premiere you come and in the Parisian, where it became qualified by the composer and teacher Vincent d’E Indy as “Music for the Moulin Rouge, not for a symphonic concert hall”). Mahler, to be danced, needs a refined detailed design (like the one who had a tudor in Dark Elegies) and also, of the honest assumption of his poetics, not to impose anything Rocambolesco.

The problems with Concertante They are from another. These are accents in execution and create a plastic and sharply geometric continuum that amalg me what, at times, Frank Martin’s music proposes us almost in dissection.