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George Balanchine’s Serenade has the most beautiful opening in ballet. Seventeen women standing like statues, bathed in cool blue light, raise one hand in the air, palms outwards, as the music of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings surges around them. It has the most elegiac closing moment too, as a single standing ballerina is lifted aloft by four men, curved arms flung behind her, arching into the unknown.
The rest of the piece, made in 1934 for students of the Russian-born choreographer’s nascent school in the US, is just about perfect. It incorporates mundane daily events – a student running in late, a stumble, a woman unpinning her hair – and turns them into mysterious art. In its ceaseless, inventive movement it makes space visible, as the dancers seem to mould the air they move through.
It’s a wonderful opener to a Royal Ballet triple bill that is a tribute both to the choreographer and to his dancer Patricia Neary, who has sensitively staged his ballets around the world since the 1970s, and at the age of 82 has decided she needs to retire. It also marks the culmination of the Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections festival with a reminder of just how supremely satisfying ballet can be.
The dancers of the Royal, in various combinations of casts over eight performances, rise to Serenade’s wonders. On opening night, Lauren Cuthbertson blazed in the ballerina role, while Mayara Magri sparkled and Melissa Hamilton brought wistful melancholy. In a later cast, Marianela Nuñez, Leticia Dias and Claire Calvert all revealed how abstract choreography can contain both emotion and personality.
The same is true in Symphony in C (1947), danced to Bizet, where the stage is full of white tutus as four ballerinas, their partners and elegant entourage dazzle with their skill and precision. It’s a challenging ballet, but one that can bring out the best in people: Fumi Kaneko and Vadim Muntagirov, on opening night, seemed propelled by their own brilliance in the speedy opening movement; Nuñez and Reece Clarke transfixed in the swooning second, and Joseph Sissens and Dias shone in the fast fourth.
In between these two masterpieces there’s The Prodigal Son from 1929, the last ballet commissioned by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with swirling fauvist designs by Georges Rouault and a score by the young Sergei Prokofiev. It’s old-fashioned, but the stylised choreography still looks radical, as Cesar Corrales’s dramatic Prodigal jumps high into the air to show his desire for freedom.
The music throughout is beautifully performed by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, directed with speed and finesse by former New York City Ballet conductor Fayçal Karoui.
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Balanchine: Three Signature Works is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 8 April
