Last year, Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Ballet Company merged with the Milwaukee Ballet to become the Pennsylvania and Milwaukee Ballet. The new company is based in both cities, with seasons in each. Despite the change of name, the combined company's affinity for the work and spirit of the late George Balanchine has remained constant.
The connection goes back to the Pennsylvania Ballet Company's first artistic director, Barbara Weissberger. She had been a student at Balanchine's School of American Ballet, and after forming her company, she included many of his ballets in the repertory. The present artistic director, Robert Weiss, formerly a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, has maintained the link in his own ballets, as well as adding a baker's dozen of Balanchine's works to Pennsylvania's active repertory.
During the February season, Weiss' Bartok Piano Concerto No. 3, a ballet expressive of longing and poignant loss, like so many of Balanchine's own works, has no story line, but rather creates a mood. As the object of Marin Boieru's frantic pursuit, Melissa Podcasy displays a lyrical style befitting the elusive and tantalizing heroine. Boieru's clean, vigorous attack, with a neatly polished finish, clearly places him in the top rank of the company's male dancers.
Classical Base
Weiss is at east moving large masses, and manages to create striking visual images throughout. He works from a classical base, but discovers novel ways of reshaping this base so as to convey serenity and menace with equal facility. The lead couple appears almost as helpless players in an impersonal tragedy, in which two guardians, Andrew Carroll and Meredith Rainey, intervene whenever Boieru is on the verge of attaining his goal.
In addition to the thirty regular members of the company, some twenty-eight apprentices form the crowd that repeatedly threatens to engulf the principals. The use of these younger dancers carries on the Balanchine tradition of giving prospective company members stage experience as part of their training.
Richard Tanner, the company's artistic associate, presented his exotic and ritualistic Skin & Steel. The title refers to the materials used to make the instruments of the percussion ensemble that accompanied the ballet, which were dimly perceptible behind a scrim upstage. The music, by a contemporary American composer, Tim Clark, suggests in its overall scoring the traditional gamelan orchestras of Indonesia. Tanner, a dancer with the New York City Ballet for eleven years, was also a choreographer for the company and its affiliated School of American Ballet.
In Skin & Steel, a work in four movements, high spirits alternate with a mood of mystery. The lead couple, Lisa Sundstrom and Phillip Otto, paired a slim, supple woman and a vigorous partner in a sensuous romantic duet.
Balachine's Valse fantasie reflects his lifelong interest in the waltz form. Unlike the sublime Liebeslieder Walzer, Valse fantasie is a light, playful duet set against a background of four members of the corps de ballet, who provide a witty running comment on the conventions of the nineteenth century. Debra Austin, formerly a soloist with New
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