American Ballet Theatre: Sylvia.

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE, NEW YORK, NY Sylvia, JUNE 3-6 AND 13-16, 2005

Let's look at Ashton's Sylvia, which was the major event of ABT's spring season. As someone who reviewed the ballet's first night at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on September 3, 1952, and whose wife danced in it, I can vouch for the revival's almost unexpected authenticity. The Royal Ballet's Christopher Newton has done an extraordinary job in piecing together fading videos and even faster fading dancer memories, patchworking the whole fabric together as seamlessly as designer Peter Farmer put together, with minimal necessary revisions, the original Second Empire designs by Robin and Christopher Ironside.

The beauty of Ashton's work is capsulated in the divine simplicity of its choreography, which merges with the equally effortless 1876 Delibes score to provide a double image of old-style Paris Opera grandeur and new-style 20th-century neoclassicism. The mythological story of Sylvia, a virgin huntress, her swain, Aminta, and the villain, Orion, suggests a chaste young girl growing into sexual awareness and womanhood, rather like fairytale Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. Also the ballet was Ashton's homage to his muse, Margot Fonteyn, although over the years the role was eloquently danced by many other ballerinas.

When Ballet Theatre was starting up in 1939, Ashton was its founder's first hope for principal choreographer but the invitation went astray in the mail, so the final choice eventually fell on another Englishman, Antony Tudor. But ever since its revival of Les Patineurs in 1946, ABT has had a special relationship with Ashton choreography, always dancing it to the manner born.

That reverence was evident in the casting of these eight gorgeous performances. Each splendid cast exposed and explored the ballet's multifaceted beauty in a premiere series worth a gold-plated footnote in ABT history. Gillian Murphy, the first Sylvia, sweetly matched with a rapt Maxim Beloserkovsky as her Aminta, had the right Amazonian thrust to her dancing. Julie Kent, less happily teamed with an unduly serious Gennadi Saveliev, serenely showed off the classic panache demanded of the last act. Michele Wiles, like Murphy technically exultant, excelled in the role's speed and was sultry in her mock seduction of Orion; she found a passionate Aminta in Marcelo Gomes. But the most satisfying pairing was Paloma Herrera with Angel Corella, both of whom danced and acted with just the poetic lyricism and contrasting brilliance Ashton's choreography thrives on.

See www.dancemagazine.com for Clive Barnes' review of the rest of ABT's spring season. For more information: www.abt.org.