Dance: Jazzing It Up at the Ballet

Robbins meets Gershwin, and both come out winners

George Gershwin was the archetypal American composer: a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith with high artistic aspirations. The man who set the country humming Oh, Lady, Be Good and Someone to Watch Over Me also wrote more formally complex, jazz-tinged "crossover" works like Rhapsody in Blue, three Preludes for piano, and most ambitious of all, the Concerto in F for piano and orchestra.

In dance, the likely parallel is Choreographer Jerome Robbins, 63, of the New York City Ballet. Robbins' popular credentials are impeccable—a string of Broadway hits that includes the dances for On the Town, West Side Story, Gypsy and Fiddler on the Roof. Yet his first love has always been ballet, and during a career stretching back to 1944, he has created such modern classics as the footloose Fancy Free, the silent Moves and a brilliant gloss on Afternoon of a Faun. Last week at Lincoln Center, in a meeting of two kindred spirits, Robbins came face to face with Gershwin's biggest, most problematic instrumental work, unveiling The Gershwin Concerto, based on the Concerto in F.

Gershwin was never entirely comfortable in the high-toned world of "serious" art. But Robbins is; his sense of structure—of how to hold a multimovement piece together—is stronger and surer. Against an art deco backdrop with a huge "G," Robbins enshrines the soul of Gershwin's piano in four crisply moving soloists, led by the technically dazzling, ebullient Darci Kistler. He impersonates the orchestra with a corps of 24 dancers—a dozen of each sex—and follows the episodes of the music as if he were charting a graph. Yet, where Gershwin's music ultimately degenerates into appealing but theoretically unrelated vignettes, Robbins' dance is unified with a tight vocabulary of motion and movements. It is a kind of visual cross-referencing that constantly reminds the audience that it is watching one work, not three or 30.

At the first orchestral flourish, the corps strikes a series of sassy poses, which melt away at Maria Calegari's bluesy, ruminative entrance. During an extended first-movement pas de deux, Kistler and Christopher d'Amboise follow the music's every twist and unexpected turn, illustrating its ripples with flowing figurations of their own. The third movement's bold, thrusting opening is similarly reflected in the dance, which includes some rapid-fire footwork for D'Amboise inspired by the rat-a-tat-tat of the piano. Paradoxically, Robbins is most, and least, successful with his extended bagatelle in the second movement. Into a vivid world of women — the girls in dark red, Calegari and Kistler in brightest white — Robbins suddenly injects the dark, powerful presence of Mel Tomlinson, effecting a stark, dramatic contrast. He then spoils the mood by having Tomlinson and Calegari dance a lazy, dull pas de deux.

The new ballet recalls Robbins' Interplay (1945) in its brash colloquialism, and In G Major (1975) in its formal structure. (And why not? Gershwin's concerto was one of the models for Ravel's Concerto in G, on which the ballet In G Major is set.) But if the Gershwin concerto is not a pro found work, it is still joyous jazz-age jeu d 'esprit that transcends its source — bringing honor to both George Gershwin and Jerome Robbins.

— By Michael Walsh