Tribute to Jerome Robbins Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Tribute to Jerome Robbins Blu-ray Movie Review

Ballet reinvented.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 8, 2012

Jerome Robbins is one of the few choreographers whose name is recognized by large swaths of general public, largely due to his iconic work on the Broadway and film versions of the legendary musical West Side Story. Robbins had a long and successful career on The Great White Way, with a number of hugely successful musicals to his credit, including The Pajama Game, The King and I, On the Town, Gypsy and Fiddler on the Roof. Robbins came into his own at about the same time that many new ballet masters, American and international, were beginning to explore and expand the boundaries of what had traditionally been considered the boundaries of the Art. Robbins was especially interested in the then new symbiotic relationship between the worlds of theater (chiefly the Broadway musical) and classical dance, perhaps best personified by Agnes de Mille, who was reinventing the world of Broadway dancing by introducing quasi-balletic elements in such pieces as Oklahoma!. That helped inspire Robbins to both explore the same sorts of ideas in his Broadway musicals, but also conversely to introduce a more theatrical element to his ballets, as in his first collaboration with Leonard Bernstein, Fancy Free, a piece which inspired, presaged and paved the way for their huge hit On the Town later that same year. Robbins may have been in the public eye (at least the public eye outside of New York) more in his guise as a Broadway choreographer and director, but the fact is he managed to create and stage at least one more classically oriented dance piece for virtually every year he toiled away on the stages of The Great White Way. This Paris Opera Ballet Tribute to Jerome Robbins presents three disparate pieces by Robbins himself along with a world premiere by a choreographer who considers Robbins to be one of his chief mentors.

En Sol premiered in May 1975 at the New York City Ballet. The piece is set to Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major and stars Marie-Agnès Gillot and Florian Magnenet. En Sol was part of a Ravel Festival that celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the composer’s birth and which premiered some twenty new pieces by a variety of iconic choreographers including George Balanchine. Robbins’ conception is, well, fancy free, a romp at the beach, with a towering yet agile pas de deux at its core. Set before a huge cobalt blue representation of the sea, the dancers clad in swimsuit-like wear romp and frolic in a variety of athletic poses that perfectly capture Robbins’ innate ability to meld classic ballet tropes to the world of modern dance and, yes, even Broadway.

The one non-Robbins piece on this Blu-ray is Triade, a world premiere choreographed by Robbins protégé Benjamin Millepied, set to music by Nico Muhly, and starring Marie-Agnès Gillot, Laëtitia Pujol, Audric Bezard and Marc Moreau. Millepied rightly point to John Adams and (especially) Steve Reich as inspirations for Muhly’s minimalist, percussively oriented score, and Millepied himself mentions Fancy Free as a major inspiration for his ballet which features four people trading off into separate groupings as if attempting to find the perfect partner. Millepied obviously wants to achieve a dramatic subtext here and is largely successful in an invigorating but somewhat detached manner.

In the Night is probably the most traditional ballet of the four offered here. It premiered in January 1970 at the New York City Ballet, set to Nocturnes Op. 27 No. 1, Op. 55 Nos. 1 and 2 and Op. 9 No. 2 by Frederic Chopin. This set of three duets features Clairemarie Osta with Benjamin Pech, Agnès Letestu with Stéphane Bullion, and Delphine Moussin with Nicolas Le Riche. Graceful and elegant, this was Robbins’ own homage to the music of Chopin, which he is on record as stating haunted him from childhood, when he heard it at both his sister’s as well as his own dance classes. Robbins sought to portray three different stages of love and life itself, and the result, while perhaps more restrained and reserved than many of Robbins’ more famous pieces, is a beautiful example of how easily Robbins worked within a classic and traditional frame of reference.

The Concert ou Les Malheurs de Chacun is the comedy relief of the evening, and for anyone who feels ballet can’t be funny (intentionally, that is), The Concert is proof positive of just how hilarious it can indeed be. The piece premiered in 1956 at the New York City Ballet, and is once again set to the music of Chopin, this time so several of the master’s piano pieces. The stars of this laugh out loud funny enterprise are Dorothée Gilbert, Alessio Carbone, Stéphane Phavorin and Emmanuel Thibault. The ballet takes place at a piano recital as several rather rude audience members enter, go about their business and enter into a series of daydreams. Beautifully physical and almost cartoonish at times, The Concert is undoubtedly one of Robbins’ masterpieces, comedic though it may be, and it’s a perfect example of how seamlessly he wedded theatrical approaches to the more rarified world of ballet.

Tribute to Jerome Robbins Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Paris Opera Ballet Tribute to Jerome Robbins is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Bel Air Classiques with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. This is generally a very good looking release, though it suffers from an overall softness that hampers the blue lit sequences (notably En Sol) to a greater degree than the rest of the evening. While black levels are lustrous, there tends to be a lack of shadow detail toward the upstage and wings areas of the stage, meaning the actors can seem to suddenly just materialize out of figurative nothingness. Colors are generally very nicely rendered, appropriately robust and well saturated and very accurate looking. Close-ups reveal some very pleasing fine detail in both the costumes as well as the faces and bodies of the dancers. None of the four pieces really has any stagecraft or sets to speak of.

Tribute to Jerome Robbins Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As is typical with most of these Bel Air Classiques releases, two lossless audio options are offered, a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround mix and an LPCM 2.0 stereo fold down. Both of these tracks offer excellent fidelity and excellent dynamic range. There's perhaps less opening up than usual with regard to the surround mix due partly to the fact that solo piano is featured so prominently, and also that at least some of the orchestral music—notably the premiere of Nico Muhly's music for Triade—is so densely orchestrated and thereby not really prone to inherent spaciousness or clarity of line. The playing of the Paris Opera Orchestra under the direction of Koen Kessels is superb and both mixes offer a lot of nuance and color.

Tribute to Jerome Robbins Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

While there are no supplements per se on the Blu-ray disc itself, this is the first classical dance release I can recall that comes housed in an elegant Digibook, replete with a nice set of notes on Robbins and each dance printed on glossy paper with some nice photographs.

Tribute to Jerome Robbins Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Paris Opera Ballet Tribute to Jerome Robbins is a wonderful compendium of three Robbins pieces and one very interesting world premiere. The sheer scope of Robbins' approaches is beautifully on display here, from reserved classicism to free wheeling acrobatics to outright goofy comedy. Robbins almost magically mixed classical ballet tropes with more modern dance techniques and even popular dance moves, and all of those techniques, which might seem like an unsavory stew from a lesser maestro, are perfectly blended and aligned here. If you're only familiar with Robbins' name from his justifiably famous work on West Side Story, you may be in for something of a surprise as you watch this Tribute. But Robbins, as expert and virtuosic as he undoubtedly was, also had the "common man"'s touch, and his pieces always speak to the masses and to the heart. Even those who normally don't care one whit for ballet may find themselves unexpectedly entertained by this Blu-ray. With good looking video and very good sound audio, despite the dearth of supplements, Paris Opera Ballet Tribute to Jerome Robbins comes Recommended.