BALLET REVIEW : San Francisco’s ‘Swan Lake’ in San Diego

San Francisco Ballet artistic director Helgi Tomasson unveiled his problematic Baroque production of “Swan Lake” in the city by the bay in April, reserving an American-born team of principals for last in a trio of casts.

It was this pair, Evelyn Cisneros as Odette-Odile and Anthony Randazzo as Siegfried, who opened a three-day run of the ballet Thursday at the San Diego Civic Theatre and introduced some problems of their own. They will repeat these roles tonight.

Few of those who were unhappy with the Tomasson vision stressed his streamlining the action, trimming the score, interpolating a duet for the principals in the last act or re-choreographing much of the ballet. (Tomasson retained what is considered Ivanov’s Act II and Petipa’s Black Swan pas de deux in Act III.) Indeed, Tomasson’s decision to omit the intermission between the ball and the finale earned high marks for maintaining emotional tension.

Rather, the central controversy involved the discrepancy-- discordance might be a more apt word--between sight and sound. Jens-Jacob Worsaae’s decorative, pastel sets and costumes--lovingly lit by David K.H. Elliott--evokes the bucolic world of 18th-Century French painting and perhaps the music of Mozart, while Tchaikovsky’s music surges and yearns and agonizes in more mythic, unbounded, Romantic realms.

On Thursday, the discrepancy continued to disturb. There was an additional question of whether discontinuities in dancers’ phrasings were inevitable given Tomasson’s tendency to chop up Tchaikovsky’s long lines into neoclassical choreographic bits or whether they indicated company weakness.

Generally, the dancing was more brash, sharp and hard-edged than lyric and yielding. Cisneros, a fine and strong dancer, for instance, offered an Odette that was a bit of a tough cookie. No shy, imprisoned bird-woman this. She was full of vitality, rarely in repose, ready to seize the initiative. Clear in attack, she often finished phrases with an impulsive burst. She also continued with little bird mannerisms long into the act although the spell Odette is under is supposed to allow her, after all, to become a woman at night.

Interestingly, as Odile, she reined in the toughness and relied more on nuance to captivate Siegfried. But once she won him, she turned up the exultant energy, and inevitably threw off the fouette challenges with dazzle.

Randazzo’s Siegfried was a boyish, milk-fed innocent--a nice American kid who doesn’t want to let go of adolescence and whose emotional range is limited. He hardly reacted, for example, when Odette was turned back into a swan. Later, swoon-sick over Odile, he swore fidelity impetuously, hardly aware of what he was doing. But he grew in expressive stature in the final scene.

Technically, Randazzo often looked overly concerned with making mere elegant finishes, and while he danced with springy, high elevation, he also skewed his air turns and landed sloppily.

The secondary roles were strongly danced. Marc Spradling made a cold, forbidding Rothbart. Wendy Van Dyck, Shannon Lilly and Mikko Nissinen endowed the pas de trois with easy airiness. Elizabeth Loscavio and Andre Reyes were impish Neapolitans. Linda Montaner, Pascal Benichou and Lawrence Pech brought vigor to the Spanish dance.

The 24 swans danced with well-drilled precision and lightness, although they did not seem ideally impelled by the music.

San Francisco Ballet music director Denis de Coteau conducted Tchaikovsky’s wondrous score with sensitivity, verve and rare transparency. The San Diego Symphony played with impressive security and style, despite occasional glitches.