ballet video review: Ashton's Dream

[calimac]

When I wrote on Mendelssohn's birthday a couple months ago, stephan_laurent recommended Frederick Ashton's ballet on A Midsummer Night's Dream set to Mendelssohn's music. I finally got a chance to watch the DVD of the American Ballet Theatre production of what Ashton called just The Dream.

I generally prefer my ballet, like my concert music, to be of abstract content, but this is a good illustration of how clear a storytelling ballet can be, if you already know the plot. (It helped that I browsed through the play first, to remind myself which lover was in love with whom when.) Ashton abbreviated the storyline as well as the title: he chopped off Acts 1 and 5, and the Athenian court and the Pyramus and Thisbe sub-play with them: the ballet is less than an hour long, and begins with the fairies; the lovers later wander in already in the woods. Oberon is very much the master and mover in this telling, and lurks around in the background, like Figaro in The Barber of Seville, most of the time that he's not actually participating in the dance.

The dancing of the fairies was flightily beautiful, and I liked the way the mechanicals (who as a group make a brief appearance to the music of the end of Mendelssohn's Intermezzo) comically moved their legs around. The comedy was mostly incidental: the lovers' quarrel, with Lysander and Demetrius accidentally falling into each others' arms while trying to fight, was amusing; and the succeeding scene, with Puck weaving in and out among the other dancers while their characters remain oblivious to his presence, was the most impressive part.

Mendelssohn's music needed to be chopped up and reordered extensively to make it fit this version of the story. This was a little disconcerting at first. The lovers' music from the Overture kept recurring as a leitmotif, though the more churning Intermezzo music was used extensively. Titania's lullaby ("Ye spotted snakes") was played in full. The Nocturne was saved for an elegant and not too ornate pas de deux between Oberon and Titania at the end, and Bottom's prancing was set, most ingeniously, to Mendelssohn's weirdly comic Funeral March (all that was left of Pyramus).

Comments

[stephan-laurent.livejournal.com]

Good review, my friend!
Yes, indeed, Ashton needed to rework the score a bit to make it into a narrative that made sense. To me, the impressive achievement was that he (aided by John Launchberry, the musical director of the Royal Ballet Orchestra) managed to do so WITHOUT adding any extraneous music.

Yes, it involved some cutting, and reordering, and several repeats; but overall he stayed far more truer to the intent of Mendelssohn than Balanchine's daring (and sometimes clumsy) mixing in of unrelated score excerpts for his own ballet for the NYCB. This involved adding the Concert Overtures to The Fair Melusine, Sons and Strangers, <(I>Athalie and, oddly, the Sinfonia #9 for strings which sticks out like a sore among otherwise more felicitous choices.

Overall I like Ashton's ballet far more than Balanchine's; in fact, it comes close to my very favorite work by the recognized master of the Royal Ballet. Seeing it live at Covent Garden a few years back was a highlight of my England trip in 2001.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

As I wrote in the Mendelssohn post, and should have repeated here, the Overture is "intended not to retell the story of the play but to evoke its characters, plot, and general nature." So it will have to be cut up to tell the play, because there's not enough of the right types of music in the incidental music to cover the story. I expected that, even though it was disconcerting. Nevertheless I was pleased at Ashton's imaginative re-purposing of various parts of the incidental music. You're right: it gives the music a unity that could not have been achieved by sticking in other Mendelssohn works. What else, after all, sounds like A Midsummer Night's Dream?

[stephan-laurent.livejournal.com]

Nothing sounds like that early stroke of genius from Mendelssohn. Those four chords at the beginning of the overture say it all.