They also have revived ballets no longer performed anywhere else. One of those is “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” from 1947, which had not been seen in decades when Barbieri and Webb brought it back in 2011. It is the opening ballet in the company’s sixth digital program, an hour-long triple bill devoted to Ashton. (The program is available through Wednesday, one day longer than planned, because of a technical glitch that delayed the digital release.)
“Valses Nobles” is set to Ravel’s suite of the same name. With its layered melodies and unsettling dissonances, the music suggests both a dreamy euphoria and a kind of foreboding. Just four years later, Balanchine would use the same suite to much darker effect in his own ballet “La Valse.”
It is one of three Ashton works that fill the revised lineup for the company’s sixth digital program. Artistic Director Iain Webb had originally planned to feature George Balanchine’s “Serenade” along with “Valses” and Ashton’s “The Walk to the Paradise Garden.” Because of health and safety protocols, he replaced the Balanchine work with a third Ashton piece, “Facade,” which the company has performed many times.
Rhodes and Hulland last danced “Valses Nobles” together about five years ago, and it’s been at least two years since they partnered. Even after a break, Hulland said, “There’s so much comfort there. We always danced together, and Rickey’s got my back.”
The sheer joy of Balanchine’s “Donizetti Variations,” set to melodic, buoyant ballet music from Gaetano Donizetti’s opera “Dom Sébastien,” hooks you from the moment it begins. So does the wit of the choreography, which has the intensely satisfying quality of seeming to reveal the score in all its detail, while not taking it terribly seriously.
Much of the ballet features different permutations of the ensemble of nine dancers, usually arranged in threes. In one section, three women bob up and down on pointe in arabesque; two are up when the third is down, and vice versa. The counterpoint is funny and brings attention to the accents in the music.
Everybody else was expecting more from Graziano.
“People were writing to me and saying, ‘I can’t wait to hear about all this stuff you’re creating at home.’ But I wasn’t creating anything at home,” he said. “When I decided to give myself time for body healing and mental healing, I didn’t force myself to create anything. I didn’t feel I had to do anything and then things started flowing.”
That’s the way he prefers to let new choreography develop. “I always have so many random ideas and eventually I did start thinking and planning a ballet,” he said, but he initially had no dancers to work out his vision.