Entertainment

Houston troupe doesn’t meet Tex-pectations

Houston Ballet’s Karina Gonzalez gets a lift from Connor Walsh, but not from Jorma Elo’s chaotic, incoherent choreography for “ONE/end/ONE.” (Amitava Sarkar)

Houston, we have a problem: Your ballet is the fourth largest in the country and its dancers are top-notch, but it rarely visits New York. And now it’s here — but with only a fraction of the company in a chamber-sized repertory, and the ballets aren’t even good.

Tuesday night, poor Mozart got the Jorma Elo treatment: The Finnish choreographer managed to make Mozart’s music seem incoherent and trivial.

The ballet, “ONE/end/ONE,” was made through a new award, the Rudolf Nureyev Prize for New Dance. This wasn’t a great beginning.

We’ve seen this dance before from Elo: It’s his shtick. He uses classical music — this time, a recording of Mozart’s Violin Concerto in D Major — and gives us sumptuously decorated tutus, in black with gold trim.

Four couples speed through fiendish ballet steps strung together without rhyme or reason. In between they spasm and roll their arms and torsos — the ballet equivalent of Tourette’s syndrome.

Any of the hundred distortions Elo jammed into the ballet would have worked if he had done them just once or twice, but he often segues from piquant to pointless. There were impressive tricks — Melissa Hough can do double turns in the air as well as any man. But the dancers deserved better.

The rest of the program suffered from similar excess. Jiřrí Kylián’s “Fallen Angels” is a short workout for eight women with tribal, aboriginal overtones. Set to Steve Reich’s pounding “Drumming,” it’s less a performance than a feat of endurance, and has the women blowing kisses to the audience.

Christopher Bruce has made “Hush” before: It’s his stock piece, with folks in a low-lit limbo dancing to pop music. This time it’s a group of ragtag performers in whiteface, dancing to a piece by Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma. There’s good dancing and a few silly moments — at the end of McFerrin and Ma’s version of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” someone eats the bee. “Hush” would have held up better in a program that had more contrast.

Artistic director Stanton Welch aims to please an audience, but the program he brought aimed no higher than the comfort zone. A leader’s taste should go further.