NYCB Vol. 19 No. 11 - The Four Temperaments
Updated: Oct 4
Edwin Denby: "The Ballet Society, New York's new subscription organization for producing ballet and opera, opened with startling brilliance on November 20, presenting to its subscribers Ravel's one-act opera The Spellbound Child, and a new Balanchine ballet, The Four Temperaments.
"The audience, an experienced one, welcomed the executants and welcomed The Four Temperaments in particular as a novelty of extraordinary fascination and power. In its flavor The Four Temperaments is unlike any other Balanchine work. In form it is a half-hour dance ballet, without plot or locale, set to Hindemith's score of the same title (originally commissioned for it). The score consists of a set of three long themes, first stated directly, then varied four times. These variations, called "Melancholic," "Sanguinic,"
"Phlegmatic," and "Choleric," follow in their plan the four temperaments (or humors) of Hippocratic and medieval physiology. And the plan of the choreography scrupulously observes the musical plan. But the ballet as one watches it can better be described as a suite of dances of amazing richness and variety that illuminate an exceptionally powerful thick-flowing score.
"The ballet holds one spellbound by the constant surprise of its dance development, by the denseness and power of the dance images which the figures onstage create from moment to moment. One seems to be watching innumerable novel dance possibilities realized without the least hesitancy in the drive or the least awkwardness in the continuity.
"The continuity is like nothing one has seen and it looks completely self-evident. Unpredictable and fantastic the sequences are in the way they crowd close the most extreme contrasts of motion possible low lunges, sharp stabbing steps, arms flung wide, startling lifts at half height, turns in plié, dragged steps, révérences and strange reversés; then an abrupt dazzle of stabbing leaps or a sudden light and easy syncopated stepping.
"Neither sequences nor figures look familiar. The grandiose force of these crowded large motions seems to correspond in its accents to the dense tensions of the score's counterpoint, and the unexpected continuity (as the phrases evolve) to the score's smooth melodic surfacing.
"But it is the pressure and shift of the musical as well as of the dance images that is the heart of the piece; no choreography was ever more serious, more vigorous, more wide in scope or penetrating in imagination.
And none could be more consistently elegant in its bearing."
--Edwin Denby, Dance News, DECEMBER 1946
00:00 Three Themes Theme 1 - (blue) Marjorie Spohn, Stephen Caras Theme 2 - (red) Renee Estopinal, David Richardson Theme 3 - (yellow) Heather Watts, Kipling Houston
06:25 12 Variations Variation 1 - Melancholy - (blue) - (red) - (yellow) Bart Cook
12:18 Variation 2 - Sanguine - (blue) - (red) - (yellow) Merrill Ashley, Daniel Duell
17:45 Variation 3 - Phlegmatic - (blue) - (red) - (yellow) Adam Lüders
23:55 Variation 4 -Choleric - (blue) - (red) - (yellow) Colleen Neary and Ensemble
Conductor: Robert Irving New York City Ballet Orchestra TV-Version, 1977
Comments