"Vienna New Year's Concert"
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
The Ballet of the Vienna Staatsoper and Vienna Volksoper
The Company of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna
ORF, PBS et al. Television
January 1, 2008
by George Jackson
copyright 2008 by George Jackson
As the first dancing of the year, the four selections on this year's New Year's Concert from Vienna tipped the scales sadly. Two numbers were tasteless attempts to bring the 19th Century up to date and a third, while not so misguided, came in dribbles. One dance only, performed by horses and their human riders, rallied sight and thought.
Nicolas Musin was choreographer and costumer for the pair of grave disappointments. He's Belgian born with assorted training (at the Bejart-based Mudra Africa, the Paris Opera and New York's Alvin Ailey school) and has a variety of experience performing in European ballet, including Vienna's. Recently, he made Switzerland his jumping off place. Setting the "Enjoy Life" waltz in the galleries of the Albertina museum, Musin dressed the women of Vienna's good looking ballet ensemble in upended lilly gowns and the men in tuxedos with negating white striping. The movement he devised was intimate and casual, as if each couple lounged about and acted up in privacy. Waltzing can lead to privacy but is a public act with decorum and design, of which there were few traces in this number. The other Musin, a parody of a soccer match, was for the men only. The game was played in front of a baroque church (the Karlskirche) and all ingredients - architecture, dance and the sport - seemed mismatched.
Christian Tichy, Vienna born and trained, contributed choreography for one of this concert series's three traditional musical encores - Johann Strauss II's "On the Beautiful Blue Danube". I was looking forward to this waltz as something that might show a deference to tradition and have tang, based on Tichy's dances for last year's concert. However, the staging wasn't off-site (as it is and has been for all the other dances) but in the restricted space of the concert hall's corridors and aisles. Tichy, of necessity, used a single couple - Dagmar Kronenberger and Wolfgang Grascher. The pair was on-screen for brief passages only, the camera (directed by Brian Large) focusing on the orchestra and elsewhere too often. With no time or space for variance, the dancing seemed bland despite the soloists' imposing appearance.
Horses and their human partners, deploying the chiseled step vocabulary and dynamically controlled formations of classical dressage, were proof that tradition is still alive and lively in one corner of Viennese dance. What relevance has this antique form for the new year 2008? Our ability to savor the riding school's symmetries and surprises implies that, despite lives almost as brief as those of mayflies, we are yet open to intimations from beyond the horizon. The Lipizzaner stallions were filmed in the arena of the Spanish Riding School and accompanied by music called "Die Pariserin".
Georges Pretre conducted the concert with more attention to tone painting than rhythmic dalliance.
