SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Haydn, Bach, and Vivaldi:  Mark Robbins, horn; Leena Chopra, soprano; Katherine Growdon, mezzo-soprano; Christian Knapp, cond.; Mark Morris, choreographer and cond.; Martin Pakledinaz, costume designer; James F. Ingalls and Michael Chybowski, lighting designers; Seattle Symphony, Tudor Choir, Mark Morris Dance Group, Paramount Theatre, Seattle, 21.5.2010 (BJ)


For the third time in three seasons, the Seattle Symphony joined forces at Seattle’s elegant Paramount Theatre with the Mark Morris Dance Group, and the result, as before, was a combination of music and dance that may truly be called magical.

The previous two collaborations were devoted to one composer each: first Handel, then Mozart. This time it was a mixed program, with Haydn’s Horn Concerto No. 2 in D major and Bach’s Jesu, meine Freude before intermission, and Vivaldi’s Gloria making up the second half. What distinguishes Morris–a Seattle native–from almost every other choreographer I have ever encountered is, first, his sheer musicality, and then, more specifically, his gift for matching in movement the phrase-structure of the music in hand.

The three ballets on offer in this program revealed that gift in suitably differing modes. The Haydn concerto, in Morris’s 1991 interpretation titled A Lake, gave rise to an exhibition of sheer joie de vivre, delightfully witty, yet leavened with a lyrical seriousness in the central slow movement. Despite the word for joy in the first line of its text, Bach’s motet is a more saturnine creation, and in this 1993 choreography drew an aptly contemplative response from Morris and his dancers. The Gloria ballet is a rare example of second thoughts on the choreographer’s part: premiered in 1981, it was revised three years later. Based on one of Vivaldi’s most attractive choral works, it combines moods of exhilaration with earth-bound touches in which the dancers’ laborious crawling motions emphasize the cosmic awe that inevitably underlies any Christian celebration.

Choreography and dancing alike were at once fluent and sensitive, and typified Morris’s tendency to convey his vision as much through what his performers do with their arms and hands as by way of their feet and legs. I was particularly pleased to have another chance, in the Vivaldi, to admire Joe Bowie, who doesn’t at first blush present a dancerly figure, but makes up for that with sheer zest and the most winning personality.

Musically the evening was in excellent hands. Mark Robbins, the Seattle Symphony’s associate principal horn, played beautifully. He was abetted by a fine orchestral contribution under the direction of former associate conductor Christian Knapp, who also led a fervent account of Jesu, meine Freude in which the orchestra was joined by Doug Fullington’s accomplished Tudor Choir. For the Gloria, Mark Morris himself took up the baton. I don’t think his conducting is anywhere near as fine as his choreography, and there was a certain lack of precision and incisiveness in the choral and orchestral sound. But there were also no serious flaws to undercut the impact of this marvelous music, in which Leena Chopra and Katherine Growdon provided suitably eloquent soprano and mezzo-soprano solos. Altogether, then, another superb example of one art illuminating another, in a collaboration that I hope may long continue.

Bernard Jacobson