New ballets; old music; new play

I:      Wayne McGregor and the Royal Ballet

This autumn, Wayne McGregor will have been resident choreographer to the Royal Ballet for twenty years. It remains true that he fulfils the Diaghilev prescription of making works that employ modern music, modern designs (sometimes based on modern painting), and state-of-the-art lighting. His latest triple bill, “Alchemies” (in repertory at the Covent Garden opera house to May 6) does much more than his full-length “Woolf Works” (2015) or “Dante Project” (2021) to show us what McGregor dance theatre can be.

Also like or beyond Diaghilev is McGregor’s commitment to modern and unprejudiced presentation of gender: same-sex partnering and opposite-sex partnering coexist in most McGregor choreography. The stage sociology is more like Merce Cunningham dance than most ballet: all dancers are soloists (some more highlighted than others); any regimented unison ensemble is a rare occurrence; and no social unit holds fast for long.

At the Royal Ballet – McGregor also choreographs elsewhere, not least on his own Random Dance Company – the physicality of his choreography has subtly changed over the years. Dancers are still highly acrobatic in his work – straightened legs routinely sweep up to 180 degrees and then further round, like the hands of a clock – but the head-butting manners of his older pieces now make only token appearances. Women dance on point, but it’s an occasionally rather than essential part of their style. He has absorbed features from ballet footwork and legwork – ebullient or explosive small jumps, beats of the legs in the air. In a male-female duet, a man may at the same time propel a woman by her outstretched arm and may do stretched-legs jumps at the same time. A rippling gesture for the right arm alternates with one for the left arm, creating an antiphonal  rhythm:

It’s good to see again McGregor’s “Unfinished” (2023), opening the programme: it features a commissioned set by the Cuban painter Carmen Herrera (1915-2022), her only stage creation and only staged after her death. The music by Anna Thorvaldsdottir evokes climate change – old structures warping and slowly moving. Though never prompting dance rhythm, it does inspire McGregor to various forms of sustained dance adagio. You watch a stage landscape change and change again in this piece.

The programme’s centrepiece is its oldest work, “Yugen”(2018), created for Leonard Bernstein’s centenary to his “Chichester Psalms”. But this is one of Bernstein’s most soft-centred compositions; and McGregor’s response – though with some loveliness – is too pious – not in terms of religious utterance but of blandly sociological-liberal correctness.

The triple bill ends with his latest creation, new on Saturday, “Quantum Souls”. The composer is the British composer Bushra El-Turk, but McGregor takes credit for the concept and the design as well as the choreography. Upstage but central is the percussionist Beibei Wang, seated at a wide bank of instruments except once when she (playing a bowed instrument) moves playfully with one male dancer. She and the orchestra in the pit tend to alternate in making the music.

All this and much more make “Alchemies” a ballet programme of our century. I applaud, I admire, but I also note that McGregor’s choreography never changes my breathing. There are many felicities here – more than I have ever noticed in any McGregor evening before – but they are at best phrases (usually moments) that are not connected into larger sequences.

II:    Pavel Kolesnikov at the Wigmore Hall

The spell cast by Pavel Kolesnikov in his Wigmore Hall recital on Thursday 16 April fell gradually, but deeply. You could see his command of legato just by watching his arms. There were phrases in which, while one hand was playing, he allowed the other arm to  rise in the air, to hover, and to trace one arc after another, like smoke rings, before it rejoined the other in playing. He had the attack and élan for livelier passages, but there were others he played as if numb, as if such music emanated from a deep inert stasis.

He began, wearing a voluminous white shirt, with Schumann’s “Kinderszenen” . Although the programme stated he went on from “Kinderszenen” to Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari”, it seemed to me that he paused after the penultimate item of the Schumann , played the Feldman as if it were a continuation, and then wrapped up the programme’s first half with the final “Der Dichter spricht” of “Kinderszenen”. After the interval, Kolesnikov – wearing now a grey shirt with a patterned floral design – played Schubert’s sonata in G D894, with a wide command of dynamic contrasts. As with many later Beethoven sonatas, we’re in the Romantic area of music where an unfolding work becomes a stream of consciousness.

As if entirely to cleanse the palate, Kolesnikov played Rameau’s “L’Égyptienne”, wonderfully sprightly, agile, and sophisticated – a very far cry from the inwardness of the Schumann, Feldman, and Schubert that Kolesnikov had just been evoking.

III:    Jonathon Hayward and the London Philharmonic Orchestra 

It was the particular achievement of Romantic composers to make such solo works as the piano sonata into a form of poetic soliloquy. Works for larger forces such as the symphony, concerto, and overture, composed for larger forces, express quite different kinds of drama. The London Philharmonic Orchestra on Friday 10 played a programme of nineteenth-century music – Dvořák’s “In Nature’s Realm” (1891), Brahms’s “double” concerto for violin and cello (1887), Schumann’s fourth Symphony (1842, revised 1851) – that took its audience in many directions. I was delighted to discover “In Nature’s Realm”, a work new to me; you can hear parts of Dvořák’s “Rusalka” here. I don’t know the Brahms double concerto remotely well: Pieter Schoeman (violin) and Kristina Blaumane (cello) have a handsome account of it, without drawing me into its wavelength. Conductor Jonathan Hayward was at his best with the Schumann symphony. It was an evening that celebrated largeness of spirit.

IV:   “The Authenticator” at the Dorfman Theatre 

Winsome Pinnock’s new play at the Dorfman Theatre, “The Authenicator”, ticks many boxes. It’s by a black female playwright; it’s directed by a woman; its cast of three is all-female cast of three; it tackles such delicate socially delicate topics as the slavery of the past and its legacies for the present.

A welcome tweak to all these ingredients is that “The Authenticator” is set in an English country house – a symbol both of old privilege and also of an older kind of British drama. Pinnock has a playful mind, tipping the play now towards the Black visitors, Abi and Marva, who bring challenges to the history contained by this house, now towards the liberally enlightened – and fashion-following – aristocrat Fenella. Sylvestra Le Touzel plays Fenella (Fen to most) with a wonderfully absurd heartiness; she has become over forty years one of our strongest actresses. Rakie Ayola (Abi), whom I have admired since the 1990s, and Cherrelle Skeete (Marva) make the play a trio of equal forces.

Still, this is one very contrived comedy. Even if most of the audience does fully grasp (which I doubt) how both Fen and Marva may be descended from Black Sarah (slave) and Henry Hartford (enslaver), there’s so much surrounding detail that it’s hard to care.

@Alastair Macaulay 2026