MUSIC
AT the first night of the Metropolitan Ballet at the Scala Theatre, and again at Giselle on June 7th at Covent Garden, I fell to wonder- ing, as George Moore would say, what constitutes good ballet music. The Metropolitan Ballet gave two new works, The Lovers' Gallery, to music by Lennox Berkeley, and Designs with Strings, to music by Tchaikovsky. To Berkeley's Divertimento was set a story rather reminiscent of La Boutique Fantasque ; a pair of lovers are locked in a picture-gallery for the night and the characters in the pictures come to life. Now Lennox Berkeley is a genuine composer, that is to say that, whether you like his music or not, it is very carefully and deliberately composed, without redundancies due to literary or emotional programmes and without that looseness of texture and brilliance of surface which are characteristic of Tchaikovsky and, I decided, essential to a success in the theatre. Designs with Strings was virtually an " abstract " ; but the music from Tchaikovsky's A minor trio gave the choreographer all the time he needed to develop his own, visual ideas (and excellent they were), whereas in Lovers' Gallery the dance forms seemed always to be trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the music. This, I am sure, is the usual penalty for dancing to music which was conceived for the concert-hall. In the .same way, Adolphe Adam's music for Giselle would be insufferable in the concert-hall, but it gives endless opportunities for the unhurried development of dancing figures. Ballet music must obviously have precise and easily felt rhythms ; but the classical style, as in Giselle, need comparatively slow tempi, and is most effective when the orchestration is kept simple. Tchaikovsky realised this in Act 2 of Swan Lake. His pattern as a writer of ballet music was Delibes, who was himself in the same tradition as Adam, although he did a great deal to enrich that tradition. Alicia Markova, who danced Giselle on June 7th, is one of the few remaining exponents of the classical style in which lightness and a particularly gracious kind of elegance are really more than brilliance. Her dancing is the perfect example of the art that conceals art, for it looks as natural
and easy for her to float as to the rest of us it is to walk. The ground seems to be her accomplice rather than an enemy, who is none the less an enemy for being vanquished. I was never spell- bound by the achievements of her technique, but simply transported by the spectacle of so much apparently effortless grace and natural expressiveness. I think I had never known that arms could be so eloquent ; not simply elegant, but expressing nuances of feeling that are beyond the reach of most of the dancers we know.
Anton Dolin, who danced Count Albrecht in Giselle, returned to his original part of Satan in Vaughan Williams's Yob on June 8th. I last saw him in the part seventeen years ago, when the work was new, and his dance before the Heavenly Throne has remained in my memory ever since. His Satan still has the indefinable quality of nobility and grandeur which makes him almost a Miltonic figure and a worthy adversary of heaven. He has none of the Mephisto- phelian character of Robert Helpmann which strikes a false note
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