New York City Ballet Programme 2 - The Four Seasons/Moves/The Concert

Published Friday 14 March 2008 at 15:10 by Gavin Roebuck

The London Coliseum is ideal for dance and visiting for the first time in 25 years is New York City Ballet.

Choreographer Jerome Robbins is an American icon, while revered for his work in musical theatre, Robbins spent most of his creative life with NYCB where he made more than 50 ballets.

This triple bill exuberantly opened with The Four Seasons, set to operatic music by Verdi. In Winter, Megan Fairchild sparked with fast speedy pointe work, Jared Angle and Sara Mearns in Spring had a lush renewing and fecund duet danced with style, the golden richness of Summer featured the beautiful Rachel Rutherford with elegant Stephen Hanna in a sensuous duet and the delightful Fall featured a gymnastic faun in a bacchanal with gorgeous dancing from Ashley Boulder.

Moves is a unique ballet as it is performed in silence, allowing the audience to concentrate on movement and on relationships between people - with five powerful sections the audience were spellbound by the duets.

The Concert, set to the music of Chopin is perhaps the funniest of works in the ballet repertoire exploring the reveries of the listeners to Nancy McDill on the piano. With the engaging dancing of Sterling Hyltin, the audience left on a high.

These dancers are some of the finest in the world, so well worth viewing. Presented by Raymond Gubbay, Askonas Holt and publicly funded Sadler’s Wells, which seems to have money to speculate, this season appears to be taking away ticket sales from the Royal Ballet.