CityLife

Birmingham Royal Ballet: Love and Loss

BRB's The dance House

BRB director David Bintley chose two of his own short ballets to precede Frederick Ashton’s The Dream in this triple bill, but there was no doubt what was the highspot.

Galanteries, an early Bintley piece, is close to an abstract ballet, putting some of Mozart’s social music to good use as a vehicle for a display of technical and stylistic display that evokes the ideal of what ballet dancers call ‘classicism’.

It needs to have a degree of discipline in its ensembles (it could almost be called Symmetries, you might think at times) as well as soloistic skill.

But it was the latter that shone most in Salford, in particular from Angela Paul, Laeticia Lo Sardo, Sonia Aguilar and Kosuke Yamamoto.

Precision lacking

Individual style is important, but there was some precision lacking – unfortunately, because that’s the only thing that gives the choreography its significance.
 
The Dance House, from the mid-1990s and very much an occasional piece (it was brought to being following the death of a friend), gave the Birmingham company more to get their performing teeth into.
 
Oddly, though there is a kind of storyline in it, the very musicality of its construction – following the moods, twists and turns of Shostakovich’s concerto for piano, trumpet and strings – makes it, too, into a near-abstract work.

But it has colour, and in its mourning slow movement it has deep feeling, alongside the brittle jollity of much of the rest.
 
Knowing playfulness

Ashton’s The Dream, though, is in another class. It is a jewel. Fifty-four minutes of enchantment, with its inspiration drawn from the early Romantic world which Mendelssohn (the music is his) knew, and the look of theatrical performances then.
 
It’s very funny, too – the Salford audience were soon enjoying the knowing playfulness that comes with the tongue-in-cheek fairies, and the buffoonery of the yokel-like rustics and asinine Bottom (Christopher Larsen dancing en pointe, a rare accomplishment for a man and done with panache).
 
Elisha Willis was both proud and ethereal as Titania to Matthew Lawrence’s lean and mean Oberon, Alexander Campbell sparkily energetic as Puck, and the two pairs of lovers (Steven Monteith and Lei Zhao, and Robert Parker and Carol-Anne Millar) beautifully cast for clever character-studies.
 

The BRB double bill, 'Sir Fred and Mr B', is at The Lowry on Friday, July 3 and Saturday, July 4.