“By the end of the first scene, I was conquered: by the last, I was lost in admiration,” wrote the French critic Robert Brussel in 1910, after seeing the premiere of Firebird, the first full-length Russian ballet to be set to music by Igor Stravinsky. The premiere was not given in Russia, but in Paris, where the intrepid Ballets Russes performing company offered artistically bold performance seasons in the years leading up to the First World War. The Ballets Russes’s visionary impresario Sergei Diaghilev wanted to show Western audiences the art of his country as something different from the heavy Wagnerian art and Italian conventions to which they were accustomed. After trying to impress them with painting, orchestral music, and opera, Diaghilev settled on ballet as the artistic medium most expressive of his country. Firebird was his first success in the art form, and also launched Stravinsky to international fame. In the years that followed, he would score ballet twice again for Diaghilev, with Petrushka (1911) and the scandalous Rite of Spring (1913) establishing ballet as a firmly Russian art and influencing Western perceptions of Russia ever since.
Ballet was a European import to Russia, arriving at the command of the tsarist court in the18th century. European form and direction continued as an essentially foreign entertainment of the imperial theaters through the early 1900s, when a new generation of Russian dancers began to innovate, demanding more plasticity of movement and greater coordination between dance and music, which was by then pushing the limits of the classical tradition. The product was not for everyone—Rite of Spring famously caused a riot at its Paris premiere—but it blazed a trail.
As the first serious work of this distinctively Russian school, Firebird was long in conception. Its subject was the product of a collaborative effort among Diaghilev and his closest artistic colleagues. They included the dancer and choreographer Mikhail Fokin (Michel Fokine), the painter and set designer Aleksandr Golovin, the artist and critic Aleksandr Benois, and the composer Nikolai Cherepnin (Tchérépnine). They drew from compilations of Russian folktales to create a simplified scenario. Prince Ivan loses himself in the realm of the evil sorcerer Kashchei, who keeps Ivan’s beautiful princess amour captive and turns his challengers into stone. Ivan encounters a firebird, a mythical female creature who, according to folktales, gives hope to those who need it. Ivan captures the firebird and releases her when she gives him a feather that he can use to summon her in distress. This he does when Kashchei engages him with his evil servitors, who enter to octatonic music. Victorious with the firebird’s help, Ivan rescues the princess, frees the captives, and destroys Kashchei and his evil domain.
Stravinsky was Diaghilev’s fourth choice as composer, and the scheduling caused some misalignment between the score and the scenario. Fokin, who was to dance Prince Ivan in addition to choreographing the entire work, pleaded with Diaghilev to postpone the premiere, but the excitement was too great and the impresario insisted it move forward on schedule. Extra rehearsals exhausted everyone involved but got the job done. The dazzling work has remained in the repertoire ever since. Stravinsky, who lived until 1971, revised his score twice, in 1919 and again, for an American copyright, in 1945. It is that final version that is used by the Miami City Ballet, which premiered this production in 2020, just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the performing arts all over the world. The choreography is not Fokin’s, but rather that of George Balanchine, who created it in 1949 for his third wife, Maria Tallchief, for a new conception at the New York City Ballet. Later, Balanchine’s colleague Jerome Robbins amplified elements of Balanchine’s choreography, which remains in use today. Miami’s production is the only adaptation outside of New York to use it.
Balanchine’s choreography, which as his disciple and successor Peter Martins has written, succeeded by designing movement in counterpoint against the music, is lavish and bold. It surpassed the residual classicism that Fokin reserved for the Firebird’s role and transforms the whole story into an energetic dreamscape. Anya Klepikov’s sleek sets and costumes combine dark greens and browns for the forest with pure white for Ivan and the princess and blazing red for the Firebird.
In her role debut, Dawn Atkins danced with exceptional skill in the title part, pairing Balanchine’s naturalism with gentle and convincing movements. Cameron Catazaro’s Prince Ivan was beguiling and graceful but ever ready for a fight. The cast of maidens and knights danced remarkably in tableau sequences.
Alas, Firebird only lasts for just over thirty minutes, but the rest of the Miami City Ballet’s “Winter Mix” program proved mostly worthwhile. The company is big on premiering new works in the genre, a worthy if not always successful endeavor to keep it vital and alive. In her second commission for Miami, Margarita Armas scored a minor sensation with her brief Análogo, set to modern jazz, including songs performed by Nina Simone. It gestures toward attempts to understand and navigate human relationships in an ever more complex world. The final selection, set to Cole Porter’s 1942 jazz standard “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To,” with Simone at the piano in an old recording, proved the most pleasing element of the work.
Durante Verzola’s four-movement Paganini, In Play gave a fine world premiere exhibition to the strains of a string quartet. Jennifer Lauren and Renan Cerdeiro danced the principal roles of the first movement with impressive athleticism, though it was hard to find much meaning in what the dancers were intended to do over the course of the piece. Verzola’s commentary elsewhere suggests a harmony between music and movement, but he leaves the interpretation broadly to the viewer.
More impressive was the final part, Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH, the letters of which derive from the German initials used by the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (“D. Sch.”). Set to Shostakovich’s 1957 Piano Concerto No. 2, written as a birthday gift for his son Maxim, the device also played an earlier role in Shostakovich’s violently scored Symphony No. 10 (1953), which many musicologists interpret as an expression of musical triumph over Josef Stalin, whom the composer survived despite considerable stress. The same ebullient tones prevailed here, as did superb dance, with Atkins and Lauren again standing out.
Laura Joella led the Miami City Ballet Orchestra for the entire program except for Armas’s Análogo, which had electronic accompaniment, and the Verzola piece, which was relegated to the quartet. She led well-paced performances throughout.
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