The Hamburg Ballet tackles Bach and Bernstein with rich imagery and movement

A person of the church, not the theater, Bach didn’t write for dance. However dance was at his core. His instrumental suites, partitas and concertos, fabricated from dance varieties, can embody a number of the most profound music of this most profound of composers.

Bach didn’t write opera both. But drama too was at his core. His sacred cantatas and passions, and none extra so than the “St. Matthew Ardour,” embody a number of the most profound drama by this most profound of composers.

To bounce to Bach comes naturally, as Jerome Robbins, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and lots of others have lovingly demonstrated. To stage Bach doesn’t come as naturally. However Peter Sellars, particularly, has powerfully proved it may be not simply potential however important.

In 1980, seven years after changing into the director of Hamburg Ballet, American choreographer John Neumeier staged the “St. Matthew Ardour” as a balletic medieval ardour play within the metropolis’s St. Michael’s Church after which introduced it to the opera home. In 1983, it was seen as avant-garde sufficient for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. By 2005, it had change into a traditional that suited the glitzy Baden-Baden Pageant.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)

Now, 4 many years after the ballet’s creation however nonetheless not often seen outdoors of Hamburg, Neumeier’s “St. Matthew Ardour” has reached Los Angeles Opera, elevating the additional query of the place dance, sacred ardour and opera intersect. To make issues all of the extra intriguing, Dance on the Music Heart invited Hamburg Ballet to carry alongside its “Bernstein Dances” to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for 2 further evenings.

Bernstein, it so occurs, carried out and recorded Bach’s Ardour with the New York Philharmonic in 1962 in a what was seen then as a controversial strategy and nonetheless is. Bernstein lower Bach to reinforce the Ardour’s theatricality and carried out the German textual content in English. He handled the recitative narration of Christ’s final days as inescapably vivid drama. He delivered to Bach’s large choruses and solemn chorales the grandeur of Greek choruses. He unleashed uncooked operatic ardour in soul-searching arias fairly than a churchly Ardour.

Bernstein questioned every part. The “St. Matthew” was, for him, dwelling, respiratory, human theater. However its religious essence additionally received underneath Bernstein’s pores and skin. That led to his direct confrontation with God in his Third Symphony, written within the wake of the Kennedy assassination, after which in his musically and spiritually transgressive 1972 “Mass.”

Neumeier doesn’t precisely put all this collectively. “Bernstein Dances” follows Bernstein’s profession from his earliest dances and Broadway reveals as much as “Mass,” however solely its “A Easy Music” and “Meditation 2” have a look at the religious aspect of Bernstein. Together with present tunes and small incidental piano items, the principle orchestral music consists of the violin concerto, “Serenade After Plato’s ‘Symposium’” and dances from “West Facet Story.”

There are giant projections on stage of Bernstein famously conducting with extravagant feeling, one thing the corporate’s conductor, Garrett Keast, aggressively makes an attempt to match with a pit orchestra.

For “St. Matthew,” James Conlon extra reverently ⁠— and extra fairly ⁠— conducts the L.A. Opera Orchestra and Refrain together with the Los Angeles Kids’s Refrain. The vocal soloists come from the world of opera however sing from the pit.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)

Advertisement

Neumeier is sassier with Bernstein, extra stylized with Bach; in “Ardour” his dancers, wearing pristine white, create photos of elegantly thought of classical motion. Bach’s wondrous contrapuntal complexity, filled with numerical symbolism and mathematical purity, is mirrored on stage with the dancers assuming architectural set items of nice magnificence.

In each circumstances, makes an attempt at narrative work much less nicely. Bernstein sits at his piano, tormented, ecstatic and far in between, dreaming of dances that come to life. In a single blink-or-you’ll-miss-it instantaneous, Bernstein throws himself on the piano, arms out as if crucified on the keyboard. It’s greatest to blink.

The incompatible distinction between “Bernstein” and “St. Matthew” is the usage of music, the principle topic of each. In a single there’s a mishmash of Bernsteinian aptitude with two singers and pianist on stage, the temper, the strategy and vitality all the time assorted. In “St. Matthew” the music feels much less free. The very constraints of dance imply that dancers must study choreography to sure tempos. All the things has to suit the motion on stage.

Music requires much less expression to let dance have extra. That robs character from the singers, who stay within the pit, hidden to many within the viewers. On the March 12 opening, Susan Graham got here closest to capturing a palpable depth of feeling within the fervid alto aria, “Erbarme Dich” (Have mercy). Ben Bliss proved a penetrating tenor via all of it. However Kristinn Sigmundsson, a worthy Jesus on recording, floundered as bass soloist. Soprano Tamara Wilson sounded misplaced within the lengthy Ardour’s first half however rose extra to the event within the second.

Within the recitatives, through which the Evangelist narrates the Ardour and Jesus exclaims within the first particular person (Joshua Blue and Michael Sumuel, respectively), the singers boomed to make their presence felt if not seen. Nothing can hold down the opera’s magnificent refrain, though putting it behind a scrim upstage, removed from Conlon and the orchestra within the pit, diminished its effectiveness.

Dancers of the Hamburg Ballet.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)

Dancers carry out as part of “St. Matthew Ardour.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)

All of this places an enormous weight on the dancers’ shoulders. Paradoxically for opera, anyway, they’re most emotionally efficient when least expressive. After they transfer with a Bach-directed grace, they might make you imagine they had been God-directed, and the Ardour takes on a gracious spirituality.

However Neumeier’s makes an attempt at symbolism and narrative may also obtain the unlucky reverse. The dancers aren’t at their greatest when they’re proven, in a single scene, as shackled or required to take care of a saintly disposition whereas posed as if on the cross. Jesus seated cross-legged because the Buddha in meditation, nevertheless, registers as an attention-grabbing different. Upended benches, the versatile important stage properties that maintain the character of Jesus captive, make him look as if he’s in a cellphone sales space calling heaven. Chest-beating and bedlam at Jesus’ loss of life has much less energy to tear at your coronary heart than Bach’s music.

Jesus could proclaim that the spirit is keen however the flesh is weak. For Neumeier, the flesh isn’t weak, and the spirit isn’t all the time keen.

And that simply is perhaps the choreographer’s nice secret. For all his combined messaging, Neumeier creates a ritual that over 4 hours grows right into a spectacle of ceaseless, wealthy imagery and motion. Dancers with the stamina and style to maintain slowly change into brokers of astonishment. With additional performances, the musicians could really feel a little bit freer.

Combat Neumeier in the event you should. Gripe all you want {that a} Bach Ardour has no place on the lyric stage. Bach wins. This “St. Matthew” winds up being particular when it has the precise to be and, miraculously, when it doesn’t. St. Lenny doesn’t get off so simply.