CERTAINLY “Concerto DSCH” seems at first glance – even second glance – a weird name for a ballet, but Alexei Ratmansky’s new work created for New York City Ballet on Thursday night is a gold-plated, copper-bottomed hit.
It is set to Dmitri Shostakovich’s lighthearted Second Piano Concerto composed in 1957 as a birthday present for his pianist son, Maxim, and that strange title, or at least the DSCH part, derives from the musical motif taken from the German spelling of the composer’s name: D.Sch.
Naming of names apart, the ballet is the kind of work you want to see again even before the applause for the first time is unwillingly dying away.
Conceivably now confirmed as the leading choreographer of our still-young 21st century, the 39-year-old Ratmansky has, as did the composer himself, that magic creative gift for using old materials in startling new ways.
His dance vocabulary, for all its quirkily engaging little jokes and, elsewhere, smoothly languorous lyric line, is never outrageously inventive or even surprisingly original.
Yet these blithe and natural dances are totally cohesive and blend with the music like birdsong in flight. Nothing ever appears out of place or even slightly strained. Buoyancy is all!
The two solo elements here, placed in focus against the ensemble, are a bouncy trio (Ashley Bouder, Joaquin De Luz and Gonzalo Garcia) and a more lightly lovelorn duo (Wendy Whelan and Benjamin Millepied), all beautifully maintained in a jaunty, almost jazzy, counterpoint.
When dancers know they have a winner to bring home, the whole performance takes on a certain triumphal air. Everyone dashed around commandingly, and if Bouder and De Luz were more dashing than the rest, that’s because they have more at their command.
The Robbins Celebration has continued with a handsome performance of the 1988 “Ives, Songs,” all aquatinted nostalgia in a country situated between O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” and Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” preceded by a lackluster, even shoddy performance of the 1945 “Interplay.”
People talk much of the improvement in male technique, but 60 years ago Paul Godkin and even Robbins himself, could manage the finale’s four continuous double air-turns with far more finesse than does the company’s reigning male virtuoso, Daniel Ulbricht.
Rounding off the weekend were the Annual Workshop performances of the company’s School of American Ballet (the last is tonight), also with two Robbins ballets – “2 & 3 Part Inventions” and “Fanfare,” both to be taken into the general company repertory with the same performers next week.
It’s a fine vintage year – especially for the male dancers – and the 55 professional students acquitted themselves with a delightfully coltish grace.