A Season of Awe and Empathy

No less an authority than the esteemed Mark Morris considers San Francisco Ballet the best ballet company in North America. Even allowing for overenthusiastic hyperbole, there's no disputing that this troupe is way up in the top tier. (Morris's own renowned Mark Morris Dance Group does modern dance; when Morris feels like creating a ballet, he mostly does so for the San Francisco company.) So it may not be too much to say that you can leave a performance--virtually any performance--by SF Ballet feeling admiration, amazement, awe, even joy at having seen such stellar work.

This season, though, the emotions often fall into the realm of sorrow, sadness, and compassion, too. For the season's eight programs, artistic director Helgi Tomasson has chosen several pieces--and choreographed one--that are less abstract, more narrative, and very moving. A highlight was Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Winter Dreams, which is based on Chekhov's 1901 play The Three Sisters. This hour-long dance doesn't retell the tale as much as convey the lives and feelings of each sister: the lonely spinster, Olga; the unhappily married Masha, who briefly finds passion with a military officer; and the flighty Irina, who toys with and is fought over by two suitors. You feel for all of them, not least for Masha's anguished husband. That's because Tomasson trains his dancers to be superb actors, too.

Tomasson created his own emotion-filled dance in "Nanna's Lied," nine short scenes set to nine songs (sung by soprano Melody Moore) by Kurt Weill and Friedrich Hollaender. The songs have that dark, lurid sound forever equated with the time and place in which they were written: 1930s Germany. So when the innocent Nanna first comes onstage with her little suitcase, hemmed in by cold, looming towers, as the orchestra plays "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" (The Ballad of Mack the Knife), you know she's not in for an easy time of it. And then an assortment of predatory men shows up.

The season started with the classic evening-length story ballet Giselle (peasant girl has her heart broken by a callous nobleman, goes mad, and dies) and will end with the contemporary evening-length story ballet The Little Mermaid (sea creature has her heart broken by a callous prince, suffers greatly, and dies). These aren't murder mysteries--there's no loss if you know how they end or have seen them danced more than once. One of the great things about SF Ballet is how strong the entire company is; you want to see what others will do in the same role or dance. With luck, we'll some of these dances performed again next year.

Photos c Erik Tomasson, SF Ballet

Dance, Dance, Dance

I don't know why, during my 10 years as the arts editor of San Francisco magazine, I never attended a San Francisco Ballet gala until last night. Especially because, unlike with SF Symphony and SF Opera's gown- and tux-strewn opening nights, SF Ballet's gala program is performed on that one evening only. The regular programs consist of either an evening-length story ballet (such as Giselle, which opens in a couple of days) or three short, more abstract ballets. At the galas, SF Ballet offers nine or ten dances or excerpts, to showcase the splendid company that artistic director Helgi Tomasson has built in his 26 years here.

On opening nights, all three of the city's major arts organizations tend to forgo challenging works for crowd-pleasers, and the ballet's are no exception. Not that there's anything wrong with crowd-pleasers when they are performed so excitingly well. And Tomasson is great at mixing it up, always putting on the bill both classical and contemporary works that vary widely in tone and approach. So last night, for instance, we saw a pas de deux from the 1869/2003 Don Quixote (loved that stunning red-and-black tutu) and the fourth movement and finale of Balanchine's 1947 Symphony in C (men in black, corps of women in white tutus).

We saw Tomasson's own 2009 divertissement from Swan Lake, with four dancers in Russian-style velvet costumes, fur hats, and boots. By contrast, we saw the U.S. premiere of the 2006 New Pizzicato Polka, about which let me just say that if Chaplin had been a ballet star, this is the dance he would have choreographed, for three dancers in pale suits and black bowler and top hats. It was so clever and fun, and so was the excerpt from the 1997 Alles Walzer, with music by Johann Strauss Jr. and dancing by two supremely gifted and charismatic dancers who were anything but formal or staid.

That night, after the rows of dancers and conductor Martin West took their bows, Tomasson came out for his own well-deserved cheers. But that's not really his style (he never does it after regular programs); I'll bet even in his years as a principal dancer with Balanchine at the New York City Ballet, he wasn't much of a divo. He seemed most comfortable slipping through the ranks of the white tutus and off to the side, where, as the curtain descended, you could see him applauding his wonderful dancers with the rest of us.

Photo: Sarah Van Patten and Tiit Helimet in the world premiere of Val Caniparoli's Double Stop, c Erik Tomasson

Nutcracker Season

The opera season just ended, and San Francisco Opera's Ring Cycle won't come around until next summer. I'll be spending the next six months looking behind the scenes when I can, and watching other music, theater, and dance performances. There are wonderful overlaps in the arts, especially in the Bay Area. But this post may be the first time anyone has linked the fearsome Richard Wagner with the Nutcracker.

That's because my French-horn-playing friend Bill performs with both the SF Opera and San Francisco Ballet orchestras. Two days after the season-ending opera, he began playing for the ballet's beautiful Nutcracker, which runs through December 27. I see it, live or on public television, almost every year.

I first met William Klingelhoffer when I went to the opera house to ask him about playing Wagner, whose operas are the world's longest (see August 3, 2010 post). With another horn player, Bill leads the opera orchestra's French horn section. As I explained a while back, Wagner demands eight French horns for the Ring--as opposed to the normal four--so when Bill is first horn, he's head of a section that includes four horn players who don't normally perform with his orchestra. He says it's like being a baseball pitcher, who's mindful of the whole game but also has to narrow his focus to simply getting those fastballs over the plate. Bill has to concentrate on making a big sound with all those other horns as well as on playing solos.

But a ball player sits in the dugout a lot. With Wagner, the horn functions as both woodwind and brass--a part of two sections of the orchestra--"so we're playing all the time," says Bill. "You have to pace yourself, like a pitcher paces himself over the game. You need something in reserve; I mean, the first act of Gotterdammerung is something like an hour and 45 minutes by itself."

So the two-hour-long Nutcracker is a piece of cake or candy (easy for me to say), although Bill knows how to challenge himself. "You know how a baseball player hits 'for the cycle,' meaning he hits a single, double, triple, and home run in the same game? Last year I played Nutcracker for the cycle: I played all four horn parts--first, second, third, and fourth--on various days in the same run!"

Bill says he's up to about 700 performances of Nutcracker all told. And you gotta keep things interesting. But he's sticking with first horn this year. "I'm imagining a more Zen approach: Nutcracker as meditation. Ohhhhhhmmmmmmmm....."




Nutcracker photo c Erik Tomasson, SF Ballet
Photo of Bill: me