City Ballet’s ‘Robbins 100’: Making Music Theatrical

NEW YORK — All too soon, New York City Ballet’s “Robbins 100” season is over. Its 20 ballets proved hurdles the dancers, and musicians, were happy to leap in glowing form — a glow shared by the ballets themselves. Jerome Robbins, even in his most cartoon-fun or most small-scale creations, has largeness of spirit.

He also has astonishing economy. Few people speak of his choreographic musicality, partly because he shared this company and house with George Balanchine, whose acute response to music is so celebrated. Yet there are many ways to stage a score; Balanchine himself did not employ one method alone when responding to music.

Balanchine specialized in rhythmically watertight constructions that exist in brilliantly close counterpoint with their scores. But Robbins often makes us notice which parts of the score he leaves undanced, letting them create atmosphere. “Dances at a Gathering,” his most endlessly ambiguous and rewarding work, has more than one passage in which Chopin’s piano music is like the weather in the distance or the memories surrounding the empty space onstage.

The whole Balanchine motto of “See the music, hear the dance” is nonsense anyway. Even in the first movement of “Concerto Barocco,” you’re not really “seeing” Bach’s double violin concerto: The difference between the solo violins and the ballerinas following them is rhythmically large. In these City Ballet performances, the freedom of Robbins’ departures from the details of his music felt like the paintings in which Cézanne leaves parts of the canvas magisterially unpainted, or like Matisse cutouts.

As Frederick Ashton used to say, “It’s not what you put into a ballet; it’s what you leave out.” Few choreographers were more audacious than Robbins in these good deeds of omission. You can pull off such master strokes effectively only if what you’re doing has imagination and vision. Almost invariably, Robbins does.

I’m glad that City Ballet continues to program its vivid “See the Music” lecture-demonstrations, in which a conductor talks us through parts of a score, with examples played by the orchestra. This is invariably illuminating about the music, though it rarely addresses how the ballet answers it. But at the matinee on Saturday, when Andrew Litton, the company’s musical director, spoke about Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G itself, he also drew Robbins’ ballet “In G Major” (1975) into his discussion.

Litton recalled how, as a Juilliard student pianist around 1982, he had gone to City Ballet because he was dating a girl in its orchestra. “In G Major” amazed him: How had he never encountered this marvelous piano concerto before? And he was astounded by the way the forward-and-backward steps for the ballerina in the second movement answered both Ravel’s rhythm and melody. (“Several steps forward, a few backward, like most of our relationships,” Litton said.)

In the performance that followed — with the orchestra making Ravel’s Champagne score now intoxicating, now serene — the ballerina was Maria Kowroski, the company’s only remaining dancer who worked with Robbins. (He died 20 years ago.) Surely she has never danced better than in the last three years (the breakthrough began with a “Chaconne” in January 2015): Her spectacularly lissome body and calmly sweeping long limbs move with a new assurance. “In G Major” is probably a role where she could deepen her spell further. She’s less rapturous in her face, especially with eyes and mouth, than in the rest of her physicality.

When Robbins was alive, his ballets were important stages of the journey for most dancers in City Ballet; he was a famously inspiring coach, and he was quick to single out newcomers for attention. Without him, that process continues in his ballets. Lauren Lovette — who for years danced with an ingratiating quality that verged on sentimentality — has come, with just a touch more strength to underpin her delivery, into full bloom: She’s the most hilariously blithe heroine “The Concert” has had in years, and she’s all breeze and fragrance as Spring in “The Four Seasons.”

In “Dances at a Gathering,” Lovette, Tiler Peck and Abi Stafford are all like youth remembered, while Ashley Bouder, so often too knowing in Balanchine, is admirably evocative as the woman in green, who dances one of the ballet’s two memory solos. The soloist Erica Pereira is another who, after years of looking merely facile, has started to come into her own (in her case, since the fall): A heightening of stylistic rigor has helped her display an engaging sweetness. I loved her brio in “Interplay” and as Winter in “Four Seasons.”

And a corps dancer, Sebastian Villarini-Velez, has suddenly become an important player. In the last nine months, he has blazed in two roles by Peter Martins (the Jester in “Swan Lake,” Tybalt in “Romeo and Juliet”). This month he was part of a new cast of sailors on shore leave that made “Fancy Free” young again. The other two members of his crew were Harrison Coll and Roman Mejia, already winning dancers who keep broadening their range.

Dozens of other dancers this spring renewed or deepened my affection for Robbins. You couldn’t miss the release he gave the company. Who wants “Antique Epigraphs” to wait another 10 years until its next return? The mysterious poetry of this all-female ballet to Debussy — conjuring essences of bygone eastern Mediterranean cultures — is another example of Robbins’ mastery of making music theatrical.