The Stars of Stuttgart

By John T. Elson

A skeletal mob of concentration-camp prisoners shuffle wearily across the stage. As the orchestra surges to the brass-driven climax of the adagio from Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony, naked fluorescent lights flash down from the ceiling, garishly illuminating the entire theater. Slowly the prisoners turn away from the audience toward a distant, fiery orange backdrop.Slowly they doff the blankets that cover t heir bodies; on their backs are stenciled stark black numerals.

It is a moment of intensive, moving theatricality--the visual and emotional high point of John Cranko's Traces, which was given its American premiere last week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House by the magnificent Stuttgart Ballet. Traces is the portrayal of a woman who has escaped from totalitarian horrors but has yet to come to terms with those past agonies. Her present is visualized by some amiable bourgeois friends and a courtly but uncomprehending lover (Heinz Clauss).

Representing her past is a gaunt, tortured relic of the concentration camp (Richard Cragun) who periodically surfaces to stir her nightmare visions. Just as the adagio tails off in an eerie diminuendo, Traces ends with the anguish of the woman left unresolved. But the role is enacted to near perfection by Marcia Haydee, surely the finest dancing actress of the day.

Traces grandly illustrates one particular strength of Cranko's inventive --sometimes too inventive--choreography: his gift for narration and characterization. He may, in fact, be ballet's finest storyteller. Two other Cranko works, which had their U.S. premieres last week--and which will be repeated later during the Stuttgart Company's six-week American tour--displayed, in varying degrees, his flair for abstract dance.

L'Estro Armonico (The Harmony of Being) is vintage Cranko (1963) that turns out to be a rather mechanical stu dio exercise in balletic geometry. Soloists on stage cavort to solo instrumental moments from three Vivaldi concert! while the ensemble blends with orchestral passages. Plotless but pretty, the work does show off the almost Bolshoi-like muscularity of the Stuttgart's unusually strong male corps and the gamine pertness of lithe Birgit Keil.

Initials R.B.M.E. is unfairly titled and pompously annotated, but a joy to watch for all that. The initials stand for the first names of the Stuttgart's four leading principals -- Richard Cragun, Birgit Keil, Marcia Haydee and Egon Madsen. In all justice, the title should include an H., for Heinz Clauss, who brilliantly partners Haydee in a soaringly romantic pas de deux.

Cranko has described the work "as a ballet for four friends." Brahms' Second Piano Concerto was chosen as the score, the program notes explain, be cause of the composer's "passionate feeling for friendship and love." In an awkward bit of balletic literalness, Cranko carries out the friendship gim mick by having the four principals periodically link up on stage in studied poses of togetherness. Initials takes flight, however, when the soloists are left to perform the stunning variations that Cranko has devised for them. R., in particular, stands for remarkable, when Cragun almost nonchalantly shows off his enormous technique in a variegated sequence of flawless, aerial turns. A visual feast of old golds and blues. Initials is a dazzlingly mounted tribute from a gifted choreographer to four gifted virtuosi. In their performances, R., B., M.and E. (and H. too) more than pay back the tribute. John T. Elson

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