Hilary Hahn, Coppélia, Martha Graham
I: Hilary Hahn plays Lalo at New York City Ballet
The American star violinist Hilary Hahn, after a recurrent upper-body injury and surgery, has returned to playing - in no uncertain terms. As a guest with New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, she has been playing Edouard Lalo’s five-movement “Symphonie espagnole”: which, despite its title, is really a violin concerto calling for almost nonstop solo-violin playing, with demanding virtuosity. Lalo (1823-1892) was one of several French composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bizet, Chabrier, Massenet, Ravel) who composed a work in vividly Spanish style, with Spanish rhythms, colours, and intensity adding all kinds of atmospheric spice. Hahn’s playing - I caught two performances - was not only brilliant (passagework galore) but lustrous, with gorgeous depths of mellow tone.
New York City Ballet has plenty of violin concertos in its repertory - including ones by Bach, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Barber, plus Ravel’s “Tzigane”. And, though it has sometimes invited guests to play the solo parts, it usually calls on its own orchestral members for concerti. The visit of a major star such as Hahn is comes therefore as a happy surprise.
No ballet company has a musical repertory to match City Ballet’s. Conductor Andrew Litton, though he is not an instinctive dance accompanist, has done much over a dozen years to transform its orchestral playing, making it fuller in tone, with string portamenti often adding Romantic nuance. As the company’s founder-choreographer George Balanchine always wanted, you can close your eyes and still have an excellent time.
The idea of inviting Hahn to play this score here originated with the multifaceted ballerina Tiler Peck, who has newly choreographed this Lalo score. (Lalo’s music is unknown in many quarters, but his “Namouna” has been a recurrent item in City Ballet’s repertory since the creation of Alexei Ratmansky’s ballet of that name in 2010.) Peck - no relation to the company’s resident choreographer Justin Peck - is
an experienced international virtuoso dancer, in her mid-thirties, who has presented her own troupe on tour at Sadler’s Wells and elsewhere. In recent years, she has also taken up choreography; this Lalo symphony was her second creation for City Ballet. (On Thursday 28 May, she also won an Emmy for a new documentary, “Tiler Peck: Suspending Time”.)
Her “Symphonie espagnole” is a thoroughly professional job, introducing different dancers for each of the music’s first four movements, showing how many of ballet’s structural devices she understands, until she fills the stage with her massed forces for the final movement. Pretty to the eye, this “Symphonie” is also neat to the ear.
Even so, it feels regrettably superficial, not least in its ideas of Spanishness. A Habañera is an intoxicating rhythm: but Peck’s Habañera - the symphony’s fourth movement - never begins to intoxicate. Instead it becomes a glamorous showcase for men, especially for Ryan Tomash, the company’s handsome new Canadian guest. His big sweepings of arms and upper legs never catching the Habañera’s insidious lilt (which derives from the one short beat before its three longer ones).
Peck does have good taste in dancers. Thoughout “Symphonie espagnole”, she generously drawing the audience’s attention to several of the company’s younger luminaries - not just Tomash, the admirable and fleet Emma von Enck, Indiana Woodward, Tomash, David Gabriel, but also such otherwise little-spotted artists as Ruby Lister and Kloe Walker, both of whom claim space in a big way. Peck gives them all opportunities that make you long to know more of them.
Everyone - rightly - is talking of Mira Nadon, who is, with Chloe Misseldine (American Ballet Theatre), one of New York’s two most oustanding younger ballerinas: Peck has cast her in both the Scherzando second moment and (second cast) in the andante fourth. Nadon has purity, beauty, and naturalness; she’s likely to prove the company‘’s (perhaps the world’s) most enthralling exemplum of classical radiance since the great Kyra Nichols.
“Symphonie espagnole” certainly sends the City Ballet audience out happy - and it improves on repeated viewing. Yet it doesn’t dig deep into its music. Peck has constructed it, skilfully, from known ballet effects (even quoting the most hackneyed of mock-Spanish ballets, “Don Quixote”) rather than trying to take choreography where it has not been before.
II: Other repertory at New York City Ballet
This May, that Peck premiere shared a triple bill programme with another work by a woman choreographer, “Standard Deviation”, made for the company in 2023 by the Canadian Alysa Pires (pronounced like the plural of Pyre). This work uses a commissioned score by the Australian composer Jack Frerer. Frerer has made other more appealing scores, but Pires connects to this one in ways that make it eloquently strange and dramatic.
She’s more original than Peck in her deployment of body language, of male-female coöperation, and of ensemble organisation. (It’s good news to hear that she’ll make a second work for City Ballet in the 2026-2027 season.) She uses Von Enck as a compellingly fast soloist but also with emphatically knotted leg and arm positions - a fascinatingly complex dance character - whereas Victor Abreu and Naomi Corti are featured as a fascinatingly symbiotic pair. (Abreu is turned by Corti while he holds an firmly sculptural arabesque). Throughout the corps (six male-female couples), Pires shows a striking sense of human variety (several dancers are given solo opportunities), even while her ensembles are geometrically arresting.
That programme opened with Jerome Robbins’s “Opus 19: The Dreamer”, set to Prokofiev’s first violin concerto: a ballet I’ve watched with many casts since it was new in 1979. (The Royal Ballet briefly danced it in 1986.) The central “dreamer” role was made for Mikhail Baryshnikov; Robbins caught a restless, searching energy in Baryshnikov that has stimulated many subsequent men since then. The ballerina role, made for Patricia McBride, is that of a difficult muse, tempestuous and yet inspiring, often eluding the hero but finally settling into a rich symmetry with him. (Interestingly, Robbins keeps changing the numbers of corps dancers around and behind this couple. The effect heightens the ballet’s mystery.) Joseph Gordon, a beauty with an poetic command of adagio rare in American ballet, deserves all praise as the leading man, while Alexa Maxwell plays his female counterpart with a thrilling blend of decisiveness and unknowability.
City Ballet’s repertory has been marvellously varied this May. The one full-length ballet has been its 1974 production of “Coppélia”, directed by Balanchine and his long-term colleague Alexandra Danilova, with Acts One and Two largely along the lines of Marius Petipa’s 1884 St Petersburg production, and with new dances by Balanchine for most of Act Three. The story of “Coppélia” may be slight, but at least it’s unusual among nineteenth-century ballets in having its heroine taking charge of matters and sorting out the delusions of its two main men - her boyfriend Franz and the Pygmalion-fantasist Dr Coppélius. When the production was young, it had an incomparable Coppélius in Shaun O’Brien; but none of his current successors, even the often superb actor Robert La Fosse, has begun to show the role’s darkness or its pathos.
I’ve seen all the company’s four Swanildas. The most applauded has been Megan Fairchild, a dancer so youthful and popular that I’m sorry to record that I find her performance vapid. Tiler Peck’s interpretation, by contrast, is too calculating and too sly. Fortunately Indiana Woodward plays the role with really haunting ebullience - all her muscles seem to have inner springs - so that the story becomes a large human exploration of space, time, and humanity. Better yet is Von Enck, petite but long-legged, coolly elegant and charming but with delicious touches of verve and attack: where most Swanildas are lovably knowable, Von Enck is enchantingly unknowable.
Woodward is also splendid in the central role of Balanchine’s 1956 sublime “Divertimento no 15”, surrounded by such junior ballerinas as Emily Kikta, Sara Adams, and Ashley Laracey matching her in high refinement of classical style. (One longs for Von Enck to join this ballet.) In “Divertimento no 15”, Mozart’s brio and élan meet their dance counterparts on levels where forms meet forms, and where rhythms answer rhythms. We’re watching Platonic ideals, it seems, moving in serene harmony.
III: The New York Public Library’s Martha Graham exhibition
There has been a New York Public Library for the performing arts at Lincoln Center since 1965. A haven for all who love the history of the performing arts, its dance collections are especially fine. (And bewilderingly capacious.) This May, it has opened a centenary exhibition of America’s oldest company, the Martha Graham Dance Company.
Yes, Martha Graham started her company as a regular enterprise in 1926. This exhibition shows how she taught and coached others - and how she spoke about dance. You see excellent silent films - and marvellous photogrpahs - from the 1930s and 1940s that document Graham dramatising space alone or interacting onstage with her early all-female colleagues. Her stillnesses, her falls, her shudders all still have staggering intensity after almost a century. Her sculptural fullness and her rhythmic acuity are the quintessence of modernism in motion.
When she is seen beside such male colleagues as Erick Hawkins and Merce Cunningham, she takes her essentially feminist drama to new subtleties and complexities - though it may be said that Graham was nonetheless at her greatest before she admitted men to her company in 1937, when her own physicality was at its most astounding, and when her heroic world of women without men was indeed a world. Even when I was first watching the Graham company in the 1970s, when Graham was alive, it was true that only a few subsequent members of her company knew how to make her dramas fresh. Too many Graham heroines now look like bad Joan Crawford. But to watch Graham herself again, when she was breaking new ground: this, in film and in photographs, remains tremendous.
@Alastair Macaulay 2026