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Balanchine and “Concerto Barocco.”
The Miami City Ballet’s closing night of their season at the Kravis Center here in West Palm Beach presented three works, two by Balanchine, one by Jerome Robbins. It’s possible that “Concerto Barocco” just knocked my socks off, so I couldn’t see the other two pieces at all, but the Robbins - a wispy ballet to wispy Chopin music - bored me, and Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” I admired but from a distance.
“Concerto Barocco,” is danced to a piece by Bach, but you’d never know it. It plays as if Bach not only wrote the music but choreographed the dance. Most dances, even great ones, are applied over the music like a coat of paint. The colors might be beguiling, but you can always tell there’s a push-pull going on, because few choreographers are selfless enough to give themselves over to a composer, mostly because they know that the eye usually takes precedence over the ear.
But “Concerto Barocco” is seamless, Balanchine entering into what can only be called a communion, a conversation, with another great artist. It’s the ballet as call-and-response. As with Bach, the dance has that light, airy, slightly playful feel that only the greatest artists can summon, no matter how serious their themes.
It’s a dazzling piece, and I was, appropriately enough, dazzled.
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