Praise-worthy ballet at cathedral
PERFORMANCE
Bach at the Ballet
★★★★
St George's Cathedral
Review: William Yeoman
JS Bach's music is dance in the praise of god. So it's fitting the WA Ballet's first appearance in St George's Cathedral since 2009's Mozart-inspired Lacrimosa should be in the company of the composer Mozart declared "the father of us all".
Opening the cathedral's 2015 concert series, Bach at the Ballet featured the combined talents of cathedral organist and master of choristers Joseph Nolan, members of WA Ballet and talented young violinists (and cathedral choir lay clerks) William Huxtable and Freya Swarbrick.
The eclectic program exemplified not only the series' artistic director Nolan's highly creative vision for music-making at the cathedral but ballet artistic director Aurelien Scannella's theme for the ballet's 2015 season, We'll move you.
While there was also some crossover between Bach at the Ballet and the recent Zip Zap Zoom: Ballet at the Quarry, it was Nolan who seized on the triple-z factor with a powerful pre-emptive assault on the senses in the form of a thunderous, blistering account of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
After such a curtain-raiser, the WA Ballet needed to pull something very special out of the hat. Which they duly did, with a playful yet disciplined account of Daniel Roberts' We'll move you, created especially for the company's 2015 launch season and danced to the only non-Bach of the evening, a movement from Vivaldi's Summer concerto from the Four Seasons.
Less literal than Mark Morris's choreography in Mozart Dances, recently performed here as part of the Perth International Arts Festival, Roberts' choreography embellishes a predominantly classical vocabulary with free-flowing contemporary graces.
Performed by a well-matched ensemble of colourfully attired male and female dancers to Huxtable, Swarbrick and Nolan's equally colourful playing, We'll move you made for an exquisitely arresting spectacle during which it often seemed like Meissen figurines had sprang to life in a gothic revival china shop.
The counterpoint to We'll Move You was the final work of the evening, Brazilian-born WAB dancer Andre Santos' powerful, austere and darkly exuberant In Black. A black-clad ensemble sometimes subtly, sometimes violently fragmented into various groupings as Bach's magnificent C minor Passacaglia and Fugue inexorably worked through its 20 variations before exploding into a complex fugue on the same theme.
This was undoubtedly the strongest and most visceral performance of the evening, with Nolan's choice of articulations and registers considerably enhancing the patterns of tension and release inherent in the dancers' own articulations and in Santos' sweeping choreography as a whole.
The short intervening dance works - Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's La Pluie danced by company ballet mistress Sandy Delasalle and Matthew Lehmann in a repeat of their Ballet at the Quarry performance and Jayne Smeulders' Rendez-vous, danced by company artistic director Aurlelien Scannella and Sarah Hepburn - provided graceful interludes. Bach's music - the Goldberg Variations and the Air on a G string respectively - was again so satisfyingly pressed into service.
These were followed by a performance by Huxtable and Swarbrick, sensitively accompanied by Nolan on harpsichord, of Bach's D minor concerto for two violins, the two soloists' natural musicality and affinity for the music only occasionally marred by insecure intonation in much the same way poor sightlines must have marred the enjoyment of the evening's dance works for many in the audience. It is interesting to note that this same D minor concerto was used by George Balanchine as a starting point for his famous Concerto Barocco - one of the works the WA Ballet will perform in May as part of its Embraceable You - A Celebration of Balanchine.
