Ballet Nights 007

Cadogan Hall, London
April 1, 2025

While the seventh edition of Ballet Nights may have had the suffix ‘007,’ it fell short on James Bond-style thrills. There were high spots but, overall and unusually, the evening proved somewhat underwhelming.

As has become the tradition house pianist Viktor Erik Emmanuel got things underway, although departed from his usual Chopin to open with Liszt’s flashy, virtuoso, Variation No.6 on a theme by Paganini. There was no shortage of fireworks here as Emmanuel was finger perfect.

The Black Swan variation from Swan Lake deserves the same pizzazz as the Liszt but, although nobly stepping in at the last minute for an injured dancer, Shiori Kase was not, on this performance, an Odile who would have one over her Siegfried. It was accurate and careful but lacked the sparkle and the sort of bravura that the role demands. And, in an evening that otherwise shunned the classical, it seemed something of an out-of-place token tutu.

Kayla-Maree Tarantolo and Harvey Evans gave us a rendition of Echo Echo, made by Madeleine Squire, a first artist at Scottish Ballet. It’s an interesting piece that has sufficient variation in dynamic to capture and then hold the attention throughout. In dark red trousers that in fact looked black on stage, and bright turquoise tops, Tarantolo and Evans looked like exotic birds glimpsed in flashes of brilliance in a tropical forest. It also had easily the most inventive lighting of the evening, starting and finishing with the dancers enclosed in a swirl of white light.

New York Theatre Ballet resident choreographer Marco Pelle’s Safe From Sleep, danced by Royal Ballet veteran Mara Galeazzi, was less successful. Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel is over-used which in turn made the dance seem clichéd. Clad in billowing white, Galeazzi floated around the stage but, while all pleasing enough, Safe from Sleep is not exactly exciting.

Roughcut is a classic piece from the great Richard Alston and the students from the Rambert School acquitted themselves with aplomb. Cramming eighteen dancers onto the small stage, we could see what was missing in so much of the rest of the evening’s choreography. Alston uses solid ballet technique without ever losing faith with contemporary dance and the result fizzes. Pairs, solos, ensemble work, it fair zipped along, the young dancers communicating their joie de vivre across the footlights.

Eric Gauthier’s ABC is a real crowd pleaser but also deceptively difficult. It needs a dancer of fine calibre to pull it off, and got one in the shape of Victor Caixeta from Dutch National Ballet. He has the apparent insouciance that Mikhail Barishnikov brought to the likes of Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra Suite, seemingly casually knocking off the series of virtuoso solo excerpts from the nineteenth-century canon that ABC demands but never over-egging the pudding. He certainly left us wanting more.

The second half opened with another recital, Scherzo Fantastique, Op.25 (Dance of the Goblins) by Antonio Bazzini, a violinist-composer contemporary of Paganini. It provides similar challenges as the Liszt for pianists and here was played by Michael Bochman. There were one or two rough edges in places but it nevertheless got ‘Act Two’ off to a good start.

Death of the Bachelors is an intriguing piece performed by Nahum Mclean and Darius Drooh (aka Blacbrik) to 1960s pop. It was a close-run thing but it just pipped Alston’s Roughcut as the most exciting piece of the evening. With a feel of ‘One for my baby (and one more for the road)’ about it, two bachelors realise that youth and freedom are behind them. With the aid of two bar stools and bodies that ripple as if they are made merely of fabric, there are shades of the Nicholson Brothers in a compelling performance.

I once wrote a critique of a dance piece which I titled ‘101 Ways To Torture a Cello.’ Bach Re-imagined is its cousin. It’s never a good thing when a cellist spends several minutes plugging his instrument in. ‘Traitor’ one should cry. That, or maybe just cry. The recording and amplification enabled Raphael Weinroth Browne to play in canon with himself. Loudly. As with Beatrice Harrison and the nightingale, it is a step too far. Dancers James Wilton and Sarah Jane Taylor performed adagio-like dance, but as if someone had slipped amphetamines in their tea. Wilton swung Taylor around his waist and over his head. Everything was too frenetic. The thing is, Bach is fine in the first place. He doesn’t need to be re-imagined.

BalletX from Philadelphia made their British debut with Francesca Forcella and Jared Kelly in excerpts from Trey McIntyre’s Big Ones. It’s a quirky, unusual piece that has been well-received Stateside but, on this evidence, it’s not one that shows them to best advantage. Forcella and Kelly were not helped by being poorly lit, or by the dark costumes that come with bizarre hare ear-like head appendages. I’ll also freely admit to not being a fan of the music of Amy Winehouse, to which it is danced. The choreograph is no doubt intended to illustrate the meaning of the songs, but the diction was so poor that barely a tenth of the words were intelligible.

Matthew Ball and Mayara Magri at least provided us with Sibelius to assuage us, but Ball’s choreography for Re(Current) is less stimulating. It was well executed but hardly brought the evening to a climax.