‘Spring’ loses its substance

The Martha Graham Dance Company mastered form but not content in a performance of Graham’s 60-year-old dance-drama “Appalachian Spring” at the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday, accompanied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The company danced the steps splendidly -- with enough sharpness and even flair to make this intimate, eight-character modernist classic fill the shell with energy -- but failed to persuasively interpret the characters or harness the impetus of the score.

The staging had no dramatic through-line or sense of direction, the story no clarity and most everyone seemed disconnected from any relationship to Aaron Copland’s music, performing the work task by task.

As the Bride (Graham’s role), Miki Orihara ricocheted from one emotional state to another without evident cause, and even when a moment seemed right, it didn’t link up with anything else, so the portrayal quickly degenerated into scraps.

Tadej Brdnik worked too hard at the Americana legwork of the Husbandman to be convincing (it’s got to be something you are, not something you do). As the Pioneering Woman, Katherine Crockett commanded merely a floaty, neoballetic warmth. Only Christophe Jeannot, as the enigmatic Revivalist, found the core of expressive integrity that Graham intended.

However, earlier in the evening, Fang-Yi Sheu managed to get beyond the company’s current prosaic, locked-down style of execution to a sense of spontaneity and even danger in her performance of Medea’s Dance of Vengeance, an excerpt from Graham’s “Cave of the Heart.”

Running across the full width of the shell, trembling with hate and a fierce, murderous resolve, Sheu whipped her hair, her spine, her whole being into a superb example of how immediate and overwhelming Graham’s choreography can still be, 13 years after her death.

In his Bowl debut, conductor Christopher Wilkins (replacing Miguel Harth-Bedoya) served “Spring” more authoritatively than this highlight from Samuel Barber’s “Medea” score. But his leadership of Barber’s “School for Scandal” overture and Violin Concerto demonstrated an admirable sensitivity to the composer’s celebrated neo-Romantic lyricism and his adroit contrasts in scale.

The concerto often uses the soloist to lead the orchestra from turbulence to calm, and Wilkins kept that relationship strongly focused on Thursday even as violinist and L.A. Phil principal concertmaster Martin Chalifour proved that his comfort zone extended from the sweet hyperextended delicacy of the early sections to the high-velocity bravura of the finale.

Video clips of Graham and Copland deftly introduced “Appalachian Spring,” though the video cameras too often followed the wrong people during the performance. The full Isamu Noguchi set graced “Spring” (with the Philharmonic directly behind it), but only one Noguchi set-unit (his wire sculpture) turned up for the “Cave of the Heart” solo.