Ballet
A Poor Show
By CLIVE BARNES
COVENT GARDEN en fete is always a stimulating sight, and the Gala given in honour of President de Gaulle showed the Opera House off to its grandest advantage. Tier upon tier of tiaras, shocking-pink carnations in their thousands tastefully arranged by Cecil Beaton, and the band of the Irish Guards playing `La Marseil- laise,' it was what is known to the trade as a 'spectacular.'
In such circumstances it seems rather a poor show to criticise the actual performance that took place on stage, but frankly it was, shall we say, less enchanting than it might have been. Or, shall we just say it was disappointingly dreary. In fact my own first disappointment came when I bought the elaborate silk programme, 'kindly contributed by the West Cumberland Silk Mills Limited' and costing ten shillings. As for last year's State per- formance for the Shah of Persia someone had ingeniously designed a programme in the shape of a Persian leaf, I was half hoping that this year's programme might be tactfully mushroom-shaped. It was not. But disappointments of more moment were to follow.
With that flamboyant modesty for which our race is famous, the performance was planned as a homage to French ballet. It will be remembered that when Mr. Khrushchev was recently in Paris, President de Gaulle look him to a State Gala of that famous Russian opera Carmen, and this was clearly a diplomatic gesture of somewhat similar significance. But while Covent Garden's cold col- lation of French designers, composers and choreo- graphers was doubtless well-intentioned, and courageously underlined our national shop- keepers' instinctive sense of inferiority in artistic matters, it also did infinitely less than justice to the true quality of the Royal Ballet and its dancers.
The performance began with the first act of
Coppelia, an incongruous opening to any Pro- gramme, unless it is to be followed by the second and third acts. To leave the hero inexplicablY climbing a ladder at the curtain fall, without so much as a programme note to pull him down, Is wilful. Nor is this first act such a compelling dance entertainment that it can be enjoyed for that sake alone. Nor, to pile on the agony, was it particu- larly well danced, and the Delibes score—the excerpt's raison d'être—was played lackadaisicallY by the orchestra.
After the interval things, or rather the planning of things, took a turn or two for the worse. Here snippets and snippets of snippets had been yanked out of Mam'zelle Angot, Swart Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, and thrown together with no regard for programme-building. Some magnifi- cent dancing by Margot Fonteyn. Svetlana Beriosova, Merle Park, David Blair and Alexander Grant inevitably went for less than it was worth. What kind of gala is it that permits on a bare, if beautifully lit, stage, an eighty-second classic solo to separate two adagios from dif- ferent pas de deux? This pot-pourri section was hopefully claimed to be in homage of the nine- teenth-century French choreographer Marius Petipa. Really!
The dowdy programme ended with the revival of Ashton's production of Ravel's La Valse, the only complete ballet given, and equally the onlY work worthy of the occasion. Waltzing couples whirl their way through a misty and be- chandeliered ballroom, dancing, as Ravel once put it, 'on the edge of a volcano.' The ballet, like the score it faithfully reflects, is a study in crescendo, with its sinister undertones never far from the sur- face prettiness of a Viennese waltz, until at the end they erupt with surprising savagery. The ballet's attractively simple choreography, woven and counter-woven into intricate patterns. was excitingly danced, and the orchestra, under Cohn Davis making his welcome Covent Garden debut, at last paid their belated, but impressively effec- five, tribute to a French composer.
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