Stepping Up to Paradise

By Martha Duffy

Showcase for a "superhuman instrument"

The New York City Ballet is on a red hot streak. It has a dozen young dancers who are crowding the established stars. And it also has Mikhail Baryshnikov, ballet's reigning superstar. Last week the company gave the world premiere of a showcase for some of the explosive talent: Jerome Robbins' The Four Seasons, set to snippets of Verdi ballet music, most of it from I Vespri Siciliani. There is nothing very deep here, but the work is a flashy hit. Ballet, like opera, is a virtuoso art. There are a lot of high Cs for the young dancers who portray the seasons of the year, and for Baryshnikov the scale steps up to paradise.

Robbins takes a light flip through the calendar. The beginning is too coy: girls dance in the snow, shivering and pushing each other to keep warm. This is not the kind of joke that the City Ballet corps can manage without making it look like a snowslide off a roof. Then, however, Robbins presents Heather Watts with a crystalline gift: a variation with fast echappes and arctic-still balances that show her strong technique.

Spring is a lyrical, intricate pas de deux for Kyra Nichols and Daniel Duell (who are husband and wife). It is the surest, most elegant part of the ballet. Summer, danced by Stephanie Saland and Bart Cook, is brief, languid and dreamy--it ends, in fact, with the couple dozing. Before that, however, they have hovered and swayed like goldenrod in their burnished costumes; this is a new and seemingly airborne partnership.

Fall is a gaudy, abandoned bacchanal starring Patricia McBride, Jean-Pierre Frohlich and Baryshnikov in the first role created for him since he joined City Ballet. He is the scarlet king of the revelers. He swivels into furious spins, only to leap high -- and go right on whirling again. It is an audacious, fiendishly difficult cadenza on the pirouette. In other spins he slows down suddenly, as if sinking into his own momentum. For sheer bravura, the high light is a series of leaps that resemble a broad jumper's hitch kick. He kicks into the air with the left leg, brings the right even higher, executing in effect a double jump suspended in air. Robbins, who worked out this unprecedented move with Baryshnikov, calls it a temps de fleche. To Ballet Master John Taras it is a grand pas de basque. Baryshnikov describes it as a jete passe.

In Broadway English, it is an applause machine. The Four Seasons is Dancin ', classical style. As he often has in the past, Robbins has made roles that enhance young dancers like Nichols, Watts and Duell. He has also shrewdly exploited the technical gifts of Baryshnikov, whom Robbins calls "a superhuman instrument." (The Fall segment will also be danced by Peter Martins with different choreography and music, to show off his serene purity of line.) On opening night, The Four Seasons was on the program between two Balanchine masterpieces, Concerto Barocco and Symphony in C. Those ballets were brutal competition for the new work, which nonetheless won the crowd with its buoyancy and elan. Rossini once said that all kinds of music are good except the boring kind. That goes for ballet too. -- Martha Duffy

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