Malta Arts Events presented an evening dubbed Spectacular Ballet at the Grand Master’s Suite, Malta Hilton, St Julian’s.
The evening began with the Pas de trois/Dance of the Mirlitons from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker by three youngsters from the Brigitte Gauci Borda School. Phoebe Schembri, Julia Tonna and Nicholas Aquilina were given an opportunity to take part in an evening dominated by some very experienced ballet stars. They were to take part again in the grand finale, the waltz from Prokofiev’s Cinderella.
They did pretty well considering their age and standard. What was annoying from the first was the unevenness of the sound quality of the recorded music. That first number was definitely too loud and this occurred again at various points. I think great care should be taken to avoid this by whoever is responsible for the sound system. The same kind of unevenness plagued the lights system which was not always as desirable as it should be.
From the dancing point of view there was a series of beautiful excerpts from classics like those choreographed by Marius Petipa: the Pas de deux from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty and the Pas de deux from Swan Lake and those from Minkus’s Don Quixote and Pugni’s La Esmeralda.
Dancers who distinguished themselves in these numbers were Sophie Benoît, Guido Sarno, Vesela Vasilyeva, Daniel Tichkov, Radka Přihodová and Adam Zvonař. A very supple Přihodová danced The Dying Swan to choreography by Fokine and to music by Saint-Saëns.
Although Tchaikovsky never wrote a ballet on the tragedy Romeo and Juliet, the love theme from his famous Fantasy-Overture of that name inspired Silviya Tomová’s choreography Love Duet, a tender creation featuring Vesela Vasilyeva and Daniel Tichkov.
A number of newer creations very prominently featured dancer/ choreographer Martin Dvořák. He danced his Duet with Irene Bauer to music from the first movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for violin and piano.
Here the movement was very energetic with a seeming attempt in a series of convoluted configurations for the male, to break out and reach for his partner... a point only reached at the end.
In the end the frequently and purposely disjointed movements of Dvořák the dancer became a little bit too repetitive as in Spaces, his rhythmically very obsessive solo to music by Nils Frahm. The faulty lights and blurred music somewhat spoilt his duo with Irene Bauer in Variations/Janaček: Motion Scores.
Yet again scratchy and muffled music marred a potentially lovely work, a solo choreographed by Bärbel Stenzenberger, Dvořák’s Motion Scores, danced by Irene Bauer to music from the slow movement of Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Concerto.
What I found the most satisfying of all the works this evening was the haunting duet I Am Waiting, music by H. Zimmer and choreographed by Zuzana Šimáková. It was beautifully shaped, warm and sensual and danced by Radka Přihodová and her well-matched partner Adam Zvonař.
The presentation attracted what seemed to be like a full house, which means that local audiences really are interested in such events. The vast majority was seated by the time the evening was to commence. Yet, there was a delay of about a quarter of an hour which remained inexplicable. The least a young man could do when he made a brief presentation was to apologise for this delay. If, as I heard later, this was in order to pander to latecomers, the latter should have been admitted after the first reasonable break.
The evening was presented in collaboration with the Austrian Embassy in Malta.