SF Chronicle: Adams Piece "Lived Up to the Buzz" in Mark Morris Dance with "Dazzlingly Sophisticated Musicality"

The San Francisco Ballet celebrates its 75th anniversary season in 2008, and the final programs are anything but a look backwards. The season comes to a close with the forward-looking New Works Festival, which began on Tuesday of this week with the first of three programs to run through May 6.

Program A includes works by choreographers Paul Taylor, Christopher Wheeldon, and Yuri Possokhov, the last featuring the late Indian film composer Rahul Dev Burman's "Aaj Ki Raat" (Tonight's the Night) that Osvaldo Golijov arranged for Kronos Quartet's Caravan . The San Francisco Chronicle's dance correspondent Rachel Howard calls it the "improbable triumph of the evening," with Possokhov pulling a number disparate pieces together "with theatrical flair."

Program B debuted on Wednesday, with works by Stanton Welch, Julia Adam, James Kudelka, and Mark Morris. The last, titled Joyride, features John Adams's Son of a Chamber Symphony, co-commissioned by Morris and Alarm Will Sound, which gave the piece its premiere performance last fall. For this week's opening, the composer conducted, and, says the Chronicle's Rachel Howard, "it lived up to the buzz."
About Morris's piece, Howard writes:

if you appreciate a ballet that offers dazzlingly sophisticated musicality, that takes classical attention to form and channels it into a modern ethos---if you cherish a ballet sure to show you something new every time you see it---then you could hardly do better than Mark Morris' Joyride.

Summing up the evening's program as a whole, Howard finds that it "fulfilled the festival's larger potential: revealing the many faces of ballet today."

To read the full Chronicle review of Program A, click here, and of Program B, click here.

The festival's third program, Program C, premiered last night and includes Jorma Elo's Double Evil, set to Philip Glass's Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra and Vladimir Martynov's Come In!, the latter which Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica recorded on the album Silencio in 2000.

For complete program and schedule information, visit sfballet.org.