Music: Ballets

New York. New York’s Metropolitan Opera closed a month ago but one night last week the Opera House was alive with white ties and decolletage, turned out to watch the American Ballet dance three premieres in one evening. Igor Stravinsky, who wrote all three, was on hand to conduct. His Apollon Misagete had never been danced in New York. Le Baiser de la Fee had never been danced in the U. S. The Card Party had never been danced at all.

In the last 20 years, Stravinsky has wandered far from his original inspiration. His musical concepts are now spare, straightforward, logical. When, in 1927. music-minded Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge commissioned him to write a ballet, he decided to make it “white.” A “white ballet” does not use colored costumes or gaudy scenery, puts its emphasis on the dancing. Stravinsky was so anxious to keep Apollon Musagete free of color that he scored it only for strings.

A white ballet is merciless to inexperienced dancers. In two years the American Ballet has gone far but is still short of a finished ensemble. Last week it did less than justice to the sophisticated sequences describing Apollo’s birth, adolescence, reception of the Muses and apotheosis. The Muses, at least, were surer on their feet than Apollo, landed more firmly after leaping just as high. Experts, disappointed in the dancing, found much to commend in Stravinsky’s dry music and Stewart Chaney’s restrained, curious set.

Le Baiser de la Fee (The Fairy’s Kiss) tells how a baby is kissed by the Queen of the Fairies and parted from his mother. He grows into a handsome young man and falls in love. The Fairy reappears, kisses him again, and he follows her into the sea. Stravinsky meant the kiss to symbolize the bestowal of genius upon Tschaikovsky, called the whole work an act of “homage,” pieced it together from Tschaikovsky melodies. The music was distinguished only by some new harmonic departures. George Balanchine’s choreography proceeded unimpeachably, caused raised eyebrows only when the Fairy Queen, in the midst of a classic dance duet, wrapped an unexpected leg around her partner’s torso.

Because he had written it expressly for the American Ballet, people took most interest in Stravinsky’s The Card Party. Irene Sharaff’s clever set represented a gaming table in perspective. Upon this table dancers costumed like cards appeared. While they were shuffled, the orchestra played a little processional. The choreography was strict and classical. Group dances, solos, finales showed the cards being played according to Hoyle. William Dollar, a slippery, mischievous Joker, upset calculations, spoiled the most promising hands, was routed finally by a Royal Flush. When the last strains of music had died away, the audience rose and cheered a composer ingenious enough to have knitted fragments by Rossini, Delibes, Strauss, Ravel, Pugni and himself into a seamless whole.

London, While the Manhattan audience settled down to watch Igor Stravinsky’s latest ballet, London critics were busy recording their impressions of Gertrude Stein’s first. Miss Stein had got her material from a love affair between a serving-girl and a cook in a provincial French hotel. “The other servants discovered them and the proprietor threw out the whole bunch.” A leading character was supposed to be Pepe, Miss Stein’s Mexican hairless dog. “Pepe knows something tragic is happening and runs around, very worried. That’s all there is to it.”

Originally the ballet had been called They Must. Be Wed. To Their Wife. By the time it reached production, in the Sadlers Wells Theatre, it was called more simply Wedding Bouquet. The fashionable audience included the Duchess of Westminster, Princess de Polignac, Sir Thomas Beecham, Viscount and Viscountess Castlereagh, Lady Cunard, the Countess of Oxford & Asquith, Charles B. Cochran. They applauded Frederick Ashton’s clever dance steps, and Lord Berner’s music and sets with such volume that the London Express critic was reminded of an air raid. A few expressed their disappointment that Pepe had been danced by a little girl instead of a dog. The Telegraph found Wedding Bouquet a “mixture of ballet reality and fantasy with a touch of crazy night.” Miss Stein supplied the crazy night touch with her odd, stammering choruses.

Chicago. Vincenzo Celli, who began dancing at Chicago’s Hull House and learned enough to become ballet master at La Scala, last week took his troupe to Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. His pianist, confused by daylight-saving, put his clock back instead of ahead, was so late that the troupe had to dance without music for an hour. Celli as Harlequin was straddling a ladder plumed like a tree when he spied the dilatory pianist, announced, “Here he is, folks. Now we can have music.”