A Summer Treat

American Ballet Theatre has something of a split personality during its current eight-week Metropolitan Opera House season. Most weeks, it offers multiple, contrasting casts performing a full-length narrative ballet—this week, it is Swan Lake, and the season’s final week (July 5–10) features Romeo and Juliet. But two weeks are devoted to the kind of mixed programs (three or four shorter ballets) that the company usually presents in the fall at City Center. Since the company’s schedule does not include that wonderful autumn smorgasbord of repertory this year, the two weeks of such programming at the Met are a special treat. The three alternating mixed bills return for eight performances beginning June 28.

The program of four Frederick Ashton works is a particular treasure. Ashton, the most eminent British ballet choreographer of the 20th century, created works in which elegance, harmony and subtle musicality were paramount. He cultivated exceptional dancers (Margot Fonteyn and Anthony Dowell were supreme exemplars of his refined style) and ABT’s performances showed how specifically challenging his choreography can be. Details of upper-body position and musical phrasing must be mastered, in addition to eternally refreshing and exciting combinations of intricate classical steps. Watching the ABT dancers in his 1956 Birthday Offering, in particular, is the dance equivalent of hearing people attempt to master an unfamiliar language. This stately, refined work for seven couples was created to showcase the Royal Ballet’s ballerinas of the era, and each woman’s variation has its own flavor and attack. Among the first of ABT’s two casts, Veronika Part and Isabella Boylston have already gone far towards making their roles distinctively their own.

Thais Pas de Deux (1971) is rich in exotic atmosphere. An elusive veiled beauty (Diana Vishneva) arrives for a gorgeously romantic encounter, marked by complimentary curving torsos and exquisitely timed lifts, with an ardent hero-warrior (Jared Matthews). The Awakening Pas De Deux (1968), danced with charm and elegance by Paloma Herrera and the fast-rising Cory Stearns, is a more contained affair; created for a production of The Sleeping Beauty, it brims with courtly reticence and budding romance. Its Tchaikovsky music, not heard in most productions of the ballet, is the interlude that Balanchine incorporated into the first act of his Nutcracker for a non-dancing dramatic interlude.

Balanchine and Ashton each found great inspiration in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and ABT’s Ashton program closes with The Dream, his magnificent, brilliantly concise translation of that wise, sweetly comic play. This is one of the loveliest and most magical ballets on any stage, and not to be missed—especially as danced with fervor by the terrific cast of Gillian Murphy, David Hallberg and Herman Cornejo.

For quality and variety, you can’t do better than the All-American program, consisting of works by Twyla Tharp, Paul Taylor and Jerome Robbins. The Brahms-Haydn Variations, which Tharp choreographed for ABT 10 years ago, makes a most welcome return. Dense, smart, intricate and sophisticated, it features five principal couples performing intricate partnering as they embody the many moods of the music’s variations. Ironically, Tharp, who is known for her skill at translating vernacular dance styles into seriously entertaining concert dance, has provided the most abstract and purely classical work of the three on this program. Taylor’s Company B—his brilliant, layered interpretation of songs by the Andrews Sisters—and Robbins’ timeless Fancy Free both evoke the America of the World War II era. Taylor created his work in 1991, celebrating the jaunty verve of that period while also maintaining an awareness of the departures and losses that were part of the fabric of people’s lives. Robbins, a young ABT dancer with an urge to choreograph, made Fancy Free in 1944, capturing the moment perfectly, and launched one of the great choreographic careers of the 20th century. With its vibrant, innovative Bernstein score and its trio of smartly delineated sailors looking for adventure in New York City, Fancy Free never goes out of style, and two contrasting ABT casts are taking on its juicy roles next week.

The mixed bills also include a program of works created for the company, of which Alexei Ratmansky’s On the Dnieper is the centerpiece, along with the Tharp and Robbins works. Created last year, this atmospheric, dramatic ballet set to Prokofiev was the first (of what one hopes will be many) works created by this exceptional choreographer in his position as ABT’s artist in residence. There is also the All-Classic Program, which includes additional pas de deux plus the only Balanchine work the company is performing this season—Allegro Brillante, a scintillating, compact showcase for virtuoso technique.

American Ballet Theatre

Through July 11, Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, 212-362-6000; $20-$111.