Golden Dregs

Empty your golden glasses to the

dregs.

Life is dark, so is death.

The words of 8th century Chinese Poet Li T'ai-Po had special poignance for Gustav Mahler in 1907. Aware that he was dying of a heart ailment, the composer felt a heightened awareness of worldly joys and beauties, and a piercing melancholy over losing them. He took six verses by Li T'ai-Po and other Chinese poets as texts for tenor, contralto and orchestra, and wrote his farewell in Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), his most personal and by all odds his best work. Scored in a rich, late-romantic idiom, its bursts of sweetness are coated with vinegar, its drawn-out lines of resignation elevated by a faith in the enduring human spirit.

Probably the last thing Mahler anticipated was that anybody would make a haunting, eloquent ballet out of the piece. Yet that is what British Choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, 37, has done. Last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, London's Royal Ballet gave Song its U.S. premiere in a performance that conveyed all the bitter-sweet flavor of Mahler's golden dregs.

Jam on Jam. The stage was bare, the costumes were rehearsal-type togs in grey, white and black. "If you combine sumptuous sets and costumes with Mahler," explains MacMillan, "you get something like jam on jam." A tenor and a mezzo-soprano sang the vocal parts from opposite sides of the proscenium, while onstage dancers representing such allegorical figures as Youth, Beauty and Everyman traced a melange of MacMillan movements that seemed to draw equally on classical, modern and Chinese dance styles.

MacMillan's best insight into Mahler's mood was in his characterization of the Messenger of Death--a role that was executed with feline power and grace by the company's fastest-rising male dancer, Anthony Dowell, 24. Though always a brooding, ominous figure, the Messenger was also a familiar and alluring one, sometimes standing patiently to the side, sometimes dancing among the other figures or carrying them away. At the end, something beyond his triumph was suggested as the mezzo-soprano sang, "Everywhere and forever the distance looks bright and blue--forever . . . forever," and he and the Everyman and Woman figures united in a slow, floating movement directly toward the audience.

More to Come. For MacMillan, the son of a Scottish chicken farmer who danced with the Royal Ballet until switching to choreography at 23 (and who now directs the ballet of the Berlin Opera), Song is an achievement that secures him a place in the front rank of younger choreographers. For the Royal Ballet, the performance was the high point of its first two weeks in New York (the start of a four-month U.S. tour). For New York ballet buffs, it was a sample of more to come. This week Royal Ballet Stars Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn make their first appearances of the season; and next week the American Ballet Theater will arrive for a month with its new, widely heralded, full-length Swan Lake.

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