Despite his apparent protests to the contrary, Paul Taylor has an acute ear for music, and his choices inevitably create results that are greater than the sum of their parts, as spectacular as his choreography is on its own. Of the three different examples last night, including Dante Variations (above, from 2004, using Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata in its version for barrel organ) and Esplanade (1975, set to Bach violin concertos), perhaps the finest example was Sunset from 1983, with khaki and red beret-clad soldiers intertwining with young women in poignant tableaux of humor and loss. Against a leafy painting by Alex Katz, Taylor’s dancers float to Elgar's graceful Serenade for Strings coupled with his Elegy for Strings. In between, Taylor inserts taped calls of loons. The heart-rending effect hauntingly evokes "…youth glorified, exterminated and remembered at its most ravishing," as Allan Ulrich writes in his program notes, and makes it hard to believe that “…[Taylor] forced himself to work with sentimental music that had little appeal to him.”
[Photo: Lisa Viola, Robert Kleinendorst, Annmaria Mazzini and Michael Trusnovec in Dante Variations (2004) by Lois Greenfield for Paul Taylor Dance Company]
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