Program 6 Notes
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Underskin
World Premiere
Composer: Arnold Schoenberg
Choreography: Renato Zanella
Scenic and Costume Design: Anne Marie Legenstein
Lighting Design: David Finn
World Premiere: April 8, 2010— San Francisco Ballet War Memorial Opera House; San Francisco, California
Underskin is made possible by the generosity of Lead Sponsors The Bernard Osher Foundation and Mary Jo and Dick Kovacevich and Sponsor the Gaia Fund.
"Haffner" Symphony
Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Choreography: Helgi Tomasson
Scenic and Costume Design: Santo Loquasto
Lighting Design: Thomas R. Skelton
World Premiere: June 25, 1991— San Francisco Ballet, Mozart & His Time Bicentennial Celebration War Memorial Opera House; San Francisco, California
Russian Seasons
Composer: Leonid Desyatnikov
Choreography: Alexei Ratmansky
Staged by: Yan Godovskiy
Costume Design: Galina Solovyeva
Lighting Design: Mark Stanley
World Premiere: June 8, 2006—New York City Ballet, 2006 Diamond Project New York State Theatre; New York, New York
San Francisco Ballet Premiere: April 28, 2009 War Memorial Opera House; San Francisco, California
Underskin
Watching San Francisco Ballet last spring, choreographer Renato Zanella was struck by some of the Company’s women who “have a kind of mystery,” he says. Immediately, he knew that in his new ballet he wanted to frame the feelings that emanate from them as they dance. “I like to produce emotion,” he says. “I’m Italian—we’re baked in emotion our whole life.” In fact, emotions are so key to this ballet that they triggered its name: Underskin. In creating it, says the choreographer, he is looking for something beneath the surface, “something deep, [with] intensity in the rich movement.”
Underskin, Zanella’s first commission for SF Ballet, serves up something markedly different from what audiences saw of his at the 2008 Opening Night Gala, the playful Alles Walzer. Zanella’s path to this commission, Artistic Directorand Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson says, “is really a funny story. I’m always looking for Gala pieces and I had seen something by a young choreographer, [not Zanella], at the Paris Opera. So I asked him to send me a videotape of it.” Once he saw the piece again, he realized that its music was already being used in that year’s Gala. But, says Tomasson, also on the tape was Alles Walzer, a “little fast dance with two men, and I thought, ‘That’s perfect.’ So I said I would like to have this piece, and he said, ‘Oops, I didn’t realize it was on there. That’s not mine. That’s Zanella’s.’ He had danced that piece; that’s why it was on the tape.” After seeing more of Zanella’s works on DVD, Tomasson says, “it was a ‘Where have you been?’ kind of thing.”
Where Zanella had been was Europe. Born in Verona in 1961, he spent his days on the basketball court, not in a dance studio—until friends convinced him to do a walk-on role in Giselle. Then 16, he wasn’t happy about the prospect. “Basketball players—you believe you’re macho and ballet is a little soft. I was young, of course,” says Zanella. “But I just loved it. I exploded with a passion to dance.” After studying in Verona and at the Centre de Danse International Rosella Hightower in Cannes, Zanella joined Switzerland’s Basel Ballet in 1982. Three years later he moved to Stuttgart Ballet, where he began choreographing; in 1993 he was named resident choreographer. In 1995 he became artistic director and primary choreographer of Vienna State Opera Ballet, a post he held for 10 years.
Now a freelance choreographer, Zanella has created ballets for summer festivals, dance companies, and operas throughout Europe and served as judge for a half-dozen international ballet competitions. In the last few years he has ventured into the United States, setting works for Chicago Opera Theater and Ohio State University. His honors include awards from Danza & Danza magazine for Best Italian Choreographer Abroad (1995) and Best Artistic Director (2001), Italy’s Premio Internazionale Gino Tani (2000), and the Austrian Special Distinction for Arts and Sciences (2001). And he has a few unusual credits to his name: In 2000 he created a nonprofit dance performance project in Vienna for people with Down syndrome, and he served as a consultant for new choreography for the Lipizzaner horses of Vienna’s Spanish Riding School.
The years he spent at Stuttgart—where he encountered works by John Cranko, George Balanchine, Jirí Kylián, William Forsythe, Hans van Manen, John Neumeier, and Mats Ek—were among his most formative, says Zanella. And he found that what he valued most was working with choreographers who placed a high value on aesthetics. “I had a chance to create with some of them, and I could see how they attacked the music, how they followed the aesthetic, how they would think.” That exposure, he says, gave him the courage to make his own dances and inspired him to follow in their path of choreographic evolution, “that line that is the development of classical ballet and neoclassical.”
As a dancer Zanella enjoyed diversity, and that has carried over into his choreography, he says. “When you step from dancer to choreographer, you make what you like to dance.” Though his dances show stylistic range, he describes them as “always very athletic.” In preparing to create, he concentrates on the ballet’s music, structure, and concept; by the time he gets into the studio he’s clear about what he wants. And although the steps he shows to the dancers are “quite precise,” he says, “I love the way they interpret them. So it’s really a give-and-take situation.”
Last spring, contemplating what he would create for SF Ballet, Zanella’s thoughts turned to a piece of music he had long known: Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. “Sometimes you like a piece of music, but you wait to find the right moment to use it. And that’s what happened with Verklärte Nacht. It is very familiar to me, but I never thought to use it until this production.” At first worried that Tomasson might think the music was too dark, he was thrilled when the artistic director said he “wouldn’t mind if [my ballet] were something dramatic,” says Zanella.
Verklärte Nacht, Schoenberg’s fourth work, is new to SF Ballet’s repertory, and Zanella is happy to be introducing it. The composer wrote it in 1899 as a sextet (two violins, two violas, and two cellos) and expanded it for string orchestra in 1943; like most of his early compositions, it shows influences from Brahms and Wagner. A violinist since age eight, the Vienna-born Schoenberg (1874–1951) began composing as a child but had no formal training until his teens, when he studied with composer Alexander von Zemlinsky. Schoenberg left Europe in 1933, settling in Los Angeles shortly thereafter; he taught at the University of California for nine years and became an American citizen in the 1940s. He is famous for his development of the twelve-tone technique of composition, or dodecaphony, in which all twelve notes in a chromatic scale bear equal weight (thus the music has no key). Although Verklärte Nacht predates that invention by some twenty years, its atonality hinted at the direction the composer would later take. It is an emotional interpretation of a poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel, in which a man and woman are walking through a forest when she discloses a secret: she bears a child that is not his. Schoenberg wrote this complex, passionate composition within three weeks of meeting Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde, whom he later married.
For Underskin, Zanella borrows the forest concept—which he says symbolizes the soul—but not Dehmel’s story. His forest is an abstract, backed by two drops that sometimes reveal and sometimes hide the dancers. Within this environment he unleashes a mystical female leader (representing coincidence, or chance); three principal women, all searching for something in the forest (and thus within themselves); four corps women who reflect the principals’ emotions; and seven men, both human and something less tangible. With the right chemistry between orchestra, dancers, and the public, says Zanella, Underskin will have “emotions that are intense enough that you recognize them yourself.”
Program notes by Cheryl Ossola
“Haffner” Symphony
“Haffner” Symphony blends the elegance of nobility with the casual atmosphere of a garden party. Purely classical in style, but without the typical grand pas de deux of a classical ballet, this buoyant ballet plays with relationships and emotions. The result is classicism without rigidity, a celebration more than a formal event. It’s as if the principal couple invited their best friends to a party and everyone is having a grand time.
San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson created “Haffner” Symphony in 1991, for the Mozart & His Time Bicentennial Celebration, held at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House. Since he created two ballets for the occasion (the other was Meistens Mozart, set to songs by Mozart and other composers of the time), he was looking for contrast in the music. And Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 in D Major “Haffner,” with its jubilatory feel, grabbed him. In translating this score into movement, Tomasson matches Mozart’s musicality in every phrase, adding vigor and complexity, nuance and sensitivity to a vocabulary that’s as classical as Swan Lake’s.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg, Austria, in 1756, wrote Symphony No. 35 in two hurried weeks in July 1782, to mark the occasion of his friend Sigmund Haffner the younger’s ennoblement. Originally composing it as a six-movement serenade, Mozart later gave the piece a symphonic structure by eliminating a march and a minuet and transposing some of the movements. In this form, the piece became acknowledged as the first of Mozart’s last six great symphonies. A child prodigy who began composing at age four, Mozart wrote hundreds of scores—concertos and symphonies, operas and other vocal works, divertimenti and chamber works—infusing them with great charm, dynamic range, and emotional depth. Despite his short life (he died in 1791, after a fever of unknown origin), he made a place for himself in history as one of the greatest composers of all time.
In bringing “Haffner” Symphony back to the repertory after an 11-year hiatus, Tomasson considered the “ingredients,” as he calls them, at hand and decided it would fit well with this season’s mix of classical and contemporary ballets. Since it hasn’t been performed recently, it’s equally fresh for dancers and audiences. Last fall, as three of the Company’s men were learning the principal role, a sense of friendly competitiveness set in as each explored ways to make the solos his own. In any ballet, small changes are often made to accommodate dancers’ idiosyncrasies and preferences; plus, today’s dancers have technique and abilities that exceed those of previous generations. So it’s not unusual, for example, for a dancer to execute five or six pirouettes where three or four had been originally set. Or, if someone prefers to turn on a particular leg, some tweaking of the transitional steps into or out of the pirouettes might be needed.
As Principal Dancers Davit Karapetyan, Vitor Luiz, and Gennadi Nedvigin worked under the guidance of Ballet Master Betsy Erickson, they pushed the movement to its limits. But any changes need to fit the tone and style of the ballet, so even if the men can squeeze more virtuosity into a step, they need to do so in context. “Whatever you do, guys, it has to make sense,” Erickson says, cautioning them to maintain the movement’s intended musicality and smoothness. At one point the principal man beckons to the women as he turns; it’s a small, courtly gesture, easily lost in the vigor of the turn. “It’s not about your pirouette,” says Erickson. “It’s about your pirouette and three women. Don’t forget them; be a gentleman.”
That combination of courtliness and delight shows in the sets and costumes as well. Tomasson told designer Santo Loquasto to give him “something besides a ballroom—something festive, not rigid.” The ballet’s disappearing garden path backdrop and soft colors seem to beckon—this is classical ballet at its most welcoming. At the ballet’s New York premiere in 1991, critic Anna Kisselgoff called it “sublime.” There might not be a better word to describe it.
Program notes by Cheryl Ossola
Russian Seasons
In Alexei Ratmansky’s Russian Seasons, themes related to love and death in a long-past Russia come to life. Setting his ballet to Leonid Desyatnikov’s score The Russian Seasons, the choreographer teases out threads of the stories told in its songs and transforms them into images and scenes that blend classically based choreography, elements of folk dance, and everyday movements. The ballet’s structure, with a dozen dancers in 12 scenes, dovetails neatly with the 12-part form of the music, which is based on both the seasons and the Russian Orthodox liturgical calendar.
Russian Seasons premiered at New York City Ballet in 2006, and last season it became the second Ratmansky ballet to enter San Francisco Ballet’s repertory; he created Le Carnival des Animaux for the Company in 2003. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Ratmansky trained at Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet Academy and danced with the Ukrainian National, Royal Winnipeg, and Royal Danish Ballets before signing on as director of the Bolshoi in 2004. His body of work consists of a mix of revitalized Stalin-era ballets, including his renowned Bright Stream; full-length works such as Cinderella, The Nutcracker, and Anna Karenina; and shorter ballets such as The Firebird, Concerto DSCH, and Jeu de Cartes. In January 2009 he became the first resident choreographer at American Ballet Theatre.
Ratmansky chose Desyatnikov’s score for its beauty, not its thematic content. Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 1955, Desyatnikov wrote The Russian Seasons in 2000, basing it on songs from Traditional Music of the Russian Lake District. In this score, five songs take a melancholy view of marriage or lament the inevitability of death. Nested between seven orchestral pieces led by a solo violin, the songs infuse the wordless passages with mourning. A soprano sings of a young woman’s sadness at her marriage to an old man, of another’s grief for a lover lost in war, of trying—and failing—to get to Eden, of how in the end we need nothing but “six feet of earth and four boards.”
The choreographer addresses the music’s weighted themes without being overly serious, a feat at least partially achieved by the inclusion of humorous moments and everyday interactions—like touching a shoulder or adjusting one’s tights. “I wanted to find this tone, like children’s books, where they tell serious things but be very simple and light,” says Ratmansky. And the lyrics’ simplicity sets the tone for the ballet as much as their themes do. “The lyrics are real folk, from the people,” says Ratmansky. “It’s very naïve, but the thoughts behind it are beautiful. It’s very simple and also deep. So my goal was to try to go in that direction.”
Because Ratmansky considers Russian Seasons a story ballet, he worked with the dancers to create the right emotions for each scene. “To look real you have to know exactly what you’re feeling and what the situation is, even though it’s abstract. All twelve dancers have moments where they have to carry the story, especially by creating the atmosphere of community.” For example, in the final movement, when a couple dances while the others watch, he says, “If we had the couple doing the pas de deux by themselves, it wouldn’t mean much. They’re surrounded by the people.”
In that scene, the couple has traded orange clothing for white, symbolizing purity, according to Ratmansky. Though the woman seems bride-like, she sings of death. “There is a strong image in old-day Russia of death in the visage of a young, beautiful woman,” the choreographer says. The woman sings to the listening dancers, whose silent, immobile presence adds power to the scene. “She is telling them serious things about life. It’s very important that there is a connection.” Through Ratmansky’s striking imagery the woman’s elegiac message becomes clear; we don’t need words to tell us the meaning of her song.
Program notes by Cheryl Ossola