Don Quixote; Photo via Lincoln Center

Last night at the Koch Theater, we had Don Quixote from the Bolshoi Ballet.  This was an offering in the Lincoln Center Festival.  It turned out to be a fine offering.  Sparkling, even.

There are many Don Quixotes about.  There’s the tone poem by Strauss (with solo parts for cello and viola).  There’s the song cycle by Ravel.  There’s the opera by Massenet. 

And, oh, yes, there’s the novel by Cervantes. 

I thought of John Coleman last night.  John was a big and cherished figure at The New Criterion, a scholar of Spanish, a scholar of music, a scholar of many things.  He called his friends “maestro.”  He was a huge pleasure to be around.

I asked him once—for he was an expert—“John, is it okay to go through life without reading Don Quixote?”  He said it was, but one would not want to deprive oneself of it.  Don Quixote was well worth the time.  It has been on my list ever since, along with 10,000 other items.

In the Bolshoi’s production of the ballet, there is a portrait behind the errant knight in the Prologue.  Cervantes?  Possibly, but I don’t know.

The ballet originated with the Bolshoi, and, according to the evening’s program notes, the company has performed it “more than 1,000 times over the past 145 years.”  So, the company is tired, right?  Phoning it in, punching a clock?  Another day, another dollar, another Don?  Not on Tuesday night, no.  The ballet was fresh as a daisy, and the dancers and the orchestra acted like it was a huge privilege to perform it.

The score is by Minkus, Ludwig Minkus, an Austrian who had his career in the Russian ballet.  He lived from 1826 until three years into World War I—1917.  He saw immense changes in that lifetime.  (Minkus died in December 1917—a month after the Bolshevik Revolution.)  Don Quixote is his best-known score, probably, followed by La Bayadère, I would guess.  Don Quixote is filled with Spanish music, as befits the subject.

Is Minkus as good as Bizet, Rimsky-Korsakov, Chabrier, and the other great Spanish composers?  No, but he is proficient—proficient at the very worst.  His Don Quixote is fit for purpose.

Fit for purpose, yes, but would you want to hear this music alone, without the dancing?  As you probably would Swan LakeRomeo and JulietThe Firebird, and other ballet scores we could name?  Maybe not, but Minkus is doing a job, and getting it done.

By the way, Stephen Hough, the British pianist, played a bit of Don Quixote in his Lincoln Center recital at the end of last season.  He offered an arrangement of his as an encore.  Thus does Minkus transcend the ballet.

I will confess to having become a bit weary of castanets last night.  There was clicking and clacking all through.  I sometimes couldn’t tell whether the castanets were being played—is that the word, “played”? —onstage or in the pit.  Some of each, I think.

Years ago, I heard a soprano play the castanets as she sang “Les filles de Cadix” (by Délibes, another of those great Spanish composers).  She made a total hash of it, clicking and clacking at all the wrong times.  Maybe singing or dancing is challenge enough.

In the last couple of weeks, I have heard grumbling that the Bolshoi has brought old, tired, familiar productions to Lincoln Center.  But one should remember:  They are always new to someone.  There’s always someone seeing a production for the first time—or the last time.  That was a maxim of Robert Shaw, the late conductor.

When conducting a very familiar work, such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, he would tell his forces, “Remember:  In the audience tonight will be people hearing this music for the first time.  And people hearing it for the last time.  Make it good.”

It would be hard to grumble at the Bolshoi’s Don Quixote, I would think.  It is filled with elegant high jinks.  It is fun from beginning to end (accounting for occasional stretches of tedium).  Naturally, I have complaints, quibbles, barbs.  For example:  It’s one thing for Gamache to be foppish, but last night he was so foppish it was hard to see how he could be interested in Kitri, or any other woman.

To repeat, the dancers had a ball.  If there were two people in New York who enjoyed themselves more than the lead dancers, Maria Alexandrova and Vladislav Lantratov, I would be surprised.  Nearly everything onstage was crisp and vital.

And so it was in the pit.  The orchestra gave no hint of slumming—none.  This is to the credit of the conductor, Pavel Klinichev.  Furthermore, the orchestra was very clean, well-nigh immaculate.  (I realize I have already mentioned “crisp,” but I am reinforcing.)  This, too, is to the credit of the conductor.  He conducted like he had an important professional engagement—which he did.

In my notes on Swan Lake last week, I said that the Bolshoi Orchestra was “confident, unafraid, present.”  The orchestra was not hiding itself under a bushel, accompanying, but playing without apology.  They were the same in Don Quixote.  An audience member could have thought of this evening as a concert with dancing.

But it was a ballet—a fusion of dance and music (and theater).  It was not the most serious evening, but a person needs a break away from tragedy now and then.  And the dancing and playing were very serious indeed—polished and knowing.  If you don’t like Don Quixote, I understand.  I really do.  But, in my estimation, this was Don Quixote done right.

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