Toward Elysium

By Martha Duffy

Suzanne Farrell is a lucky dancer. She is 39 now, and still the most exciting ballerina in the world. Purists may fret over whether her lower back is as springy as ever, but the years have if anything enhanced her artistry -- the daring and the inspired eccentricity with which she can ignite a dull ballet and redefine a great role. Farrell created her own biggest stroke of fortune simply by inspiring George Balanchine over nearly two decades to create a necklace of marvelous parts for her; it is surely the richest repertory of any dancer within memory.

After Mr. B. died in 1983, one might have expected Farrell to round out her career performing this legacy, but fresh material keeps coming. Two years ago, Peter Martins drew on her restraint and musicianship in a delicate work, Rossini Quartets. Last week at the New York City Ballet, Jerome Robbins weighed in with a really fat part. In Memory of . . . , set to Alban Berg's elegiac Violin Concerto, is a highly dramatic work, more openly emotional than Robbins usually allows himself to be. In the role of a dying girl, Farrell adds another heroine to her gallery of lost ladies.

Berg wrote his concerto in 1935 after the death of Manon Gropius, the beloved daughter of his friend Alma Mahler and the architect Walter Gropius. The girl died at 19 of polio and the composer dedicated the work "to the memory of an angel." Robbins' scenario begins quietly and a bit flatly as Farrell moves with increasing stiffness and bafflement between her lover (tenderly danced by Joseph Duell) and friends. Suddenly they move off and she is left with a gauntly beautiful angel of death (Adam Luders). Their pas de deux is the heart of the ballet. The moves are often slow and arduous, but the great tension and energy between the dancers make the struggle heartbreaking. Robbins goes boldly to Farrell's melodramatic strain, and she responds by portraying the horror of death without any romantic gloss. He exploits her ability to defy equilibrium in shocking images of paralysis; she compliments him by never overplaying the drama.

Robbins' more familiar virtues are evident too, particularly his inspired casting. In selecting Luders -- a fine partner but a phlegmatic performer often taken for granted by the audience and even by himself -- the choreographer rinses away years of familiarity to present a dancer of mesmerizing ardor. Luders reveals a plangency and aplomb that match Farrell's stroke for stroke.

Did the music remind Robbins of the past? In the theme of death and transfiguration there are resonances of the mourning and then renewal that the company has had to endure since Balanchine's death. The ballet ends with a vision of heaven, indicated in the score by a beautiful chorale. As always, Robbins skillfully uses some company youngsters: Peter Boal, looking like an archangel, Damian Woetzel, a particularly blithe spirit who joined the troupe last month, and Teresa Reyes, a recent incarnation of Balanchine's leggy ideal. In Memory of . . . ends with a homage to him. Farrell is carried offstage by Duell and Luders in the serene, lyrical "swimming" motion from Chaconne -- also set in Elysian fields.