Cathy Marston’s The Cellist broadcast from the Royal Opera House

Cathy Marston, The Cellist, from the Royal Opera House, May 29

Cathy Marston’s The Cellist, broadcast free online from the Royal Opera House as part of its Our House to Your House series, is inspired by and based on the life of the late Jacqueline du Pré, whose remarkable career was cut short at the age of 28 by the onset of multiple sclerosis. She lived for another fourteen years offstage but it is her early life from the discovery of the child prodigy to the end of her performing career that is the subject of Marston’s ballet. 

Du Pré’s emotional understanding and impassioned recording of Sir Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto made it synonymous with her name and popularised it as a major work in the cello repertoire. The score for The Cellist, composed and conducted by Philip Feeney and performed with soloist Hetty Snell, weaves the first movement of the concerto and other themes from du Pré’s repertoire into a musical narrative that follows the storyboard that Marston and dramaturg Edward Kemp lay out as a framework for the choreography. Marston makes the pivotal decision to personify the cello as a dancer (Marcelino Sambé), rather like Fokine’s use of personification in Le Spectre de la Rose. Sambé imbues the role with both dutiful acquiescence and a touching solicitude for Lauren Cuthbertson as du Pré but the coupling has the effect of reducing Cuthbertson’s interpretive agency, the very lifeblood of her art. Although her duets with Sambé are poignant, there is a sense that instead of playing the instrument, Sambé is playing her; he dances while she mimes. Ironically, the palpable bond between musician and her instrument is most apparent in scenes where Sambé watches helpless in the background while Cuthbertson struggles with her fatigue or her inability to play. 

As du Pré’s husband, Matthew Ball plays the self-assertive figure of Daniel Barenboim with charismatic elegance and charm. Like Sambé, he appears to dance Cuthbertson in a way that colours his love with ambition; Marston may be in awe of Barenboim but treats him as a dark prince. Ball’s opening solo on the rostrum ‘conducting’ Cuthbertson and Sambé in the first movement of the Elgar concerto is a highpoint in Marston’s choreographic invention; the full overhead sweep of Ball’s arm, his precise pirouettes and neat jumps on to and off the podium give the impression of someone in full command of his abilities. In the close-ups of Cuthbertson’s face — an advantage of the filmed transmission — one can see her commitment but choreographically she is overshadowed. Du Pré’s gift was her intuitive approach to making music, an internal maelstrom of forces and emotions expressed through the cello, but Marston seems reticent to let Cuthbertson dance out du Pré’s inner world with the physical sensuality and freedom with which she imbued her performances. 

The early years of their relationship saw both Barenboim and du Pré flourish, but it was all too brief. With Ball and Cuthbertson running around Hildegard Bechtler’s revolving set, Marston shows effectively the relentless pace of the subsequent international tours Barenboim planned both as soloist and conductor in which du Pré was intimately involved as part of the celebrity couple. 

It is clear from her biography that the seeds of du Pré’s debilitating illness were present before her whirlwind tours with Barenboim started but it is also clear that his concern for his own career did not cease with the end of hers; as a visibly weary Cuthbertson takes a break from circling the globe we see Ball continuing around the corner with undiminished energy in a devilish revoltade. 

In the path from precocious child to international star, du Pré was influenced by her mother, her teachers and her musical colleagues. Apart from a sensitively conceived role for Kristen McNally as her mother and a dreamy young du Pré (Emma Lucano), the other characters seem hastily sketched and the level of characterisation, particularly in terms of mime, is weak to the point of caricature; even Ball defaults to gestures that belong more to Tybalt than to Barenboim. A multifunctional ‘chorus of narrators’ embellishes the set as anthropomorphic furniture, mirrors du Pré’s physical state and embodies the legendary recorded legacy.

If some of the details are weak, the emotional core of The Cellist remains strong. Marston uses Cuthbertson’s dramatic ability to convey du Pré’s physical decline as a triumphant force of spirit over flesh; it’s what makes the stillness of the end, as Ball slips into darkness and Sambé spirals away from her, such a powerful moment, one in which Cuthbertson is once again totally engaged.

The Royal Ballet: Rhapsody, Tetractys – The Art of Fugue, Gloria

The Royal Ballet: Rhapsody, Tetractys – The Art of Fugue, Gloria, Royal Opera House, February 7

Sarah Lamb in Gloria with Thiago Soares and Carlos Acosta @ROH/Bill Cooper 2011

Sir Frederick Ashton’s Rhapsody, to Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations, was created for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1980. In the program notes Zoë Anderson relates a revealing anecdote about its creation. Baryshnikov was a guest artist of the Royal Ballet that summer and insisted on experiencing the Ashton style in a work created on him. Ashton, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to showcase a virtuoso dancer steeped in the Kirov tradition as a foil to his company. Baryshnikov later admitted to being disappointed: “I wanted English ballet and he wanted Russian ballet.” This evening it is Stephen McRae who takes on Baryshnikov’s role, standing at the centre of a large, sparsely decorated stage as the curtain rises. Clement Crisp’s effusive praise of McRae notwithstanding, his formidable technique is here in the service of somebody else’s distinctive style and steps. Ashton’s genius was to bring out the qualities of the person dancing, and in Baryshnikov he was evidently able to marry expression and technique to a high degree. Trying to recapture that undermines McRae’s ability to express himself in the technique and he is also at a stylistic disadvantage for he is very much English ballet, not Russian ballet. His partner in Rhapsody, Laura Morera, despite her Spanish origins, is very much English ballet, and she fits into Lesley Collier’s original quicksilver shoes and lovely sense of line with consummate ease (Collier was coaching the role). What she doesn’t have is the stylistic contrast in McRae to play against. With these misgivings and the six couples in pastel colours looking a little rough in their patterns and timings (especially the men), Rhapsody forms a rather under-cooked first course to an oddly assorted triple bill.

This kind of three-course menu in which a new work is sandwiched between two staples of the repertoire (82 performances each) is predominantly the responsibility of the chef and the chef at The Royal Ballet is not only the director but the one who provides the new work, in this case Wayne (‘dance doesn’t have to be the priority’) McGregor. It is his latest offering, Tetractys  – The Art of Fugue, that sits rather uncomfortably between the two classically-based works by his predecessors. McGregor stretches everything but the classical technique, and expressiveness in his dances takes a back seat to his latest intellectual construct. Seeing the work after reading the program notes about Bach’s Art of Fugue (here orchestrated by Michael Berkeley), its signs, symbols, mystical tetractys and association with the Pythagorean theory of numbers, overlaid by set designer Tauba Auerbach’s geometry of glyphs, and you feel heartened by the example of the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The cast is stellar but even stars implode: the feline Natalia Osipova, whose first appearance with Edward Watson is pure sorcery, soon fades into the miasma of over-extended limbs and onerous partnering. Eric Underwood suffers temporary eclipse as he passes through the darker sections of the McGregor/Auerbach dark universe, leaving only the ghostly trace of his phosphorescent unitard, and the luminous qualities of Marianela Nuñez and Lauren Cuthbertson are wholly consumed. McRae, dressed in green but still radiating sparks from Rhapsody, appears out of place and Federico Bonelli is clearly suffering some kind of meltdown (he was unwell enough the following evening for the work to be cancelled, though Osipova’s concussion was an additional factor).

McGregor sums up in the program notes the link between Bach’s Art of Fugue (without the definite article) and Tetractys – The Art of Fugue: ‘I am thinking of this piece as a fugue in terms of my own structure: I have the Bach, I have the design, I have my choreography and I have Michael Berkeley’s version of the score. So there are four elements, each with a different logic, but which absolutely speak to each other.’ Speaking has never been a problem for McGregor, but finding a formal framework for his onstage dialogues and an expressive vehicle for his dancers has. It was all the spirits of Ashton and MacMillan could do to pull the evening out of its black hole.

Sir Kenneth Macmillan had been contemplating a ballet about the First World War for some time as his father had served in the trenches and like so many survivors had been unable to talk about the horror. The catalyst was a 1979 BBC dramatization of Vera Brittain’s autobiography, Testament of Youth, describing the devastating impact of that war on an entire generation. Commissioned to create a new one-act work for the Royal Ballet in 1980 (the same year as Rhapsody), MacMillan brought his project to fruition, using Francis Poulenc’s Gloria in G Major — a hymn to the glory of God — as a counterbalance to his vision of the devastation of war. He discovered Andy Klunder’s sculptural work ‘accidentally’ at the Slade School of Art and felt immediately a connection to what he wanted to express in Gloria. He asked Klunder to design the set — a stylised battlefield with the dancers appearing out of and disappearing into an unseen trench at the back — and the costumes: a decaying flesh unitard for the men with the familiar Brodie helmet and a fragile silver unitard for the women with wisps of fabric hanging from the waist and ‘close-fitting caps with coiled ear-muffs’ that give them, in Jann Parry’s poignant description, the semblance of ‘wraiths of young women cheated of their wedding day’.

This is a work in which all the elements do speak to each other eloquently and the superimposition of ideas and juxtapositions create a powerful formal unity. John B. Read’s lighting maintains the dreamlike timelessness of the set while creating with the dancers deep shadows on the floor that resemble dark craters. The mood alternates between hope and pity in a subtly understated choreography that recalls Wilfred Owen’s line that ‘the Poetry is in the pity’. MacMillan casts four principal characters (Carlos Acosta and Thiago Soares as brothers-in-arms and Sarah Lamb and Meaghan Grace Hinkis as the two aspects — grieving and lighthearted — of their female companions) against a chorus of women and soldiers. After the first section of the Gloria in which the chorus slowly peoples the desolate stage, a lively quartet erupts with Hinkis being tossed freely among three men (on her own feet she dances with edgy abandon, a joy to watch). Acosta enters as if holding a rifle, a tragic figure who displays a powerful sense of weariness and despair; his turns gradually pull him down to the ground to sleep. Lamb and Soares perform the central duet to the Domine Deus sung by soprano Dušica Bijelic whose lovely voice is itself tinged with grief. Lamb is transformed here by the form MacMillan gives to the duet, her gorgeous lines complementing those of Soares in a spare choreography that fills the stage with redemptive pathos. In Domine Fili, the quartet returns with Hingis flying in over the trench followed by a trio of Lamb, Acosta and Soares. MacMillan creates masterly groupings of women like a protective fence or battlements to honour perhaps the lives of nurses like Vera Brittain herself who devoted themselves to the dying and wounded throughout the war. As Bijelic sings Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, the dancers make their inexorable way back to the trench of their death or mourning, while the trio remains as a vestige of the living. Soares and Lamb finally leave by the same path leaving Acosta circling the stage in a series of gallant leaps before coming to a halt by the trench to listen to the final strains of in gloria dei. On the uplifting Amen he drops suddenly from view to his own death and resurrection in the depths of the earth.