La Scala returns to dance live

The dancers of La Scala in Milan were bursting with energy from all pores the other night. After months of confinement this was the first show on stage and especially with the audience in the hall (oh well only in the boxes).

The opening piece of the “Four Choreographers Evening”, “Verdi Suite” conceived by Manuel Legris, the director of the company, was the perfect opening: brilliant, pleasant, a collage of dance music from Verdi’s operas. Sets alternating in twos, threes declined on an academic language that Legris, étoile of the Paris Opera at the time of Nureyev, obviously handles perfectly. Glory for all: Virna Toppi, Martina Arduino, Nicola del Freo, Marco Agostino, Mattia Semperboni, Maria Celeste Losa, Gabriele Corrado. In good part also protagonists of the other songs. And all versatile in switching from one style to another. For example, the nuances of Soviet dance in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Concerto DSCH”. This was the pearl of the evening, built on Shostakovich’s second Concerto for piano and orchestra, written in 1957, it is a tribute to the great composer and is an immersion in a retro Soviet atmosphere both for the very simple costumes, which refer to that period, and for the language that, for example in the first movement, takes on heroic tones, he poses like the statue of the worker and the peasant woman who are at the entrance of the VDNH in Moscow. Then a double step in the adagio and a fast-paced dance party in the finale. It was with this work that Ratmansky conquered the New York public in 2008. La Scala presented it in 2012 and the return is very welcome. Ratmansky’s acquaintance with Schostakovich is also dense. The choreographer has staged the ballets of the composer “Limpido ruscello” and “Il boltone”.

But the evening was also an opportunity to discover two choreographers who had never met at La Scala before. “Canon in D Major” by Pachelbel was the music chosen by Jiri Bubeniček for three dancers (Del Freo, Starace, Semperboni) who impersonate, the choreographer explicitly states, the three angels who accompanied the grandmother to whom he was very attached to heaven. . They look serene and smiling in their soft and fluid movements.

Finally, “Movements for Sravinsky” by the Hungarian Andràs Lukàcs is a piece for piano and orchestra that links together quotations, for example, from the “Prodigal Son” and from “Apollo”. Lukàcs chooses a contemporary classic style, at times ancient, alternating with collective walks, in a row from one side of the stage to the other. Commendable work, but undermined by the choice of music that dominates every other aspect of the piece