Boston Ballet’s Fall Experience dazzles with Crystal Pite, Lia Cirio

Fifty-four dancers on stage. “The Four Seasons” by Vivaldi. A light show backdrop. And that’s just Crystal Pite’s “The Seasons’ Canon,” the centerpiece of Boston Ballet’s “Fall Experience,” which opened Thursday at the Citizens Bank Opera House. The first half of the film is no slouch either: the world premiere of company director Lia Cirio’s “After,” Sabrina Matthews’ “Ein von Viel,” and resident choreographer Jorma Elo’s “Plan to B.” Three of the four choreographers are women; Pite and Matthews are Canadian. All four tracks would be welcome in future programs. It’s a good start Boston Ballet’s 61st season.

“After” is Cirio’s second work for the company’s main stage; her first, “Chaptered in Fragments,” was part of Boston Ballet’s 2022 “choreographHER” program. She assembled her score from Soviet-Austrian-American composer Lera Auerbach’s 1999 work, Preludes for Violin and Piano. James Farrell’s set evokes a giant origami seashell; Marija Djordjevic puts the men in sleeveless white suits, the women in knee-length white shifts.

Cirio’s unlikely choice of music was inspired. Auerbach’s preludes waltz and wail, scratch and ring, fire and brimstone one moment, quote folk tunes or Chopin the next. He likes bitonality and pedal points and extreme registers. All of this was well communicated Thursday by Boston Ballet Orchestra concertmaster Christine Vitale and pianist Sienna Tabron. Cirio fashioned his own 10-piece suite from Auerbach’s original 24 and took advantage of Auerbach’s quirky sensibility, matching graceful with graceful and spiky with spiky.

The highlight of “After” is its two central duets. On Thursday, Viktorina Kapitonova and SeokJoo Kim did a ghostly waltz and somnambulism at Prelude 8; Chyrstyn Fentroy and Paul Craig lend a tortured grace to the haunting, musical Prelude 15, in which the violin soars into the stratosphere. The back-up sextet – Kaitlyn Casey and Daniel R. Durrett, Abigail Merlis and Lawrence Rines Munro, Sydney Williams and Gearóid Solan – created an odd group dynamic in the Shostakovich-flavored Prelude 11. The dynamic is restless, with clues. of brotherhood here and violence there. At the end of Prelude 23, Kapitonova backed off Kim; the lights went out on Fentroy and Craig in the ponderous, Chopin-influenced Prelude 20, and the finale of Prelude 14 found Kapitonova left alone as the other dancers, Fentroy hesitating for a second, fled. You wonder what might come “Next”.

Neither Matthews’ nor Elo’s piece is new to Boston Ballet, but “Plan to B” has not been offered here since 2006, and “Ein von Viel” (“One of Many”) not since 2008. Both have baroque scores, but they could hardly be more different. Matthews created “Ein von Viel” for two dancers and a pianist on stage for nine of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”. After the pianist plays Variation 5 as an introduction, the two dancers (usually men, but the second weekend of this production will feature mostly female pairs) move in unison, counterpoint, mirror image, canon. Pirouettes give way to cabrioles, revoltades, gargouillades, pliés in seconde and tours à la seconde as the duo stretches, explores and reclaims space. Thursday’s Yue Shi and Sun Woo Lee were a clear match for the extroverted performance of lead solo pianist Alex Foaksman; they conveyed the gallantry of Variation 19 and elsewhere found ways to connect Matthews’ abstract and somewhat sober choreography.

“Plan to B,” a 2004 Boston Ballet commission, is set to sonata movements by Heinrich Biber. The music is frenetic for the most part, but somehow the six dancers create calmness through their incessant spinning. Ji Young Chae and Jeffrey Cirio were in explosive form on Thursday; Lia Cirio and Tyson Ali Clark found room for a tender, intertwining duet; Solan and Ángel García Molinero kept the energy level high. Like “Ein von Viel,” “Plan to B” doesn’t rely on physical contact, but the dancers created a sense of community.

“Canon of the Seasons,” which premiered at the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016, is actually set not to Vivaldi’s original “Four Seasons” but to selections from Max Richter’s 2012 recomposition, whose minimalist sensibility of the loop trance blends well with Pite’s organic movement. The scenic background from Jay Gower Taylor and Tom Visser, all bright colors until the snow falls, suggests some sort of emerging crystalline life form. Nancy Bryant has the men bare-chested, the women in flesh-colored tops, all in baggy khaki pants and neckties painted blue-green. Visser’s lighting is atmospheric.

The piece opens with a mass of bodies in a primordial huddle, undulating, trembling, finally no longer touching. It could be a tribe; it could be an organism. The ever-changing patterns lead to chain reactions and domino effects, with the entity reaching “Spring”. “Summer” brings a fertile trio of duets, before the anguished second movement finds everyone looking parched and perhaps looking at a scapegoat. The third movement, Vivaldi’s tempest, erupts in masculine violence, then ends in a dark, shimmering stupor. An abbreviated “fall” restores the good feelings in a long line of dancers perpendicular to the audience; “Winter” sees a woman lifted up and parading through a snowstorm, gesticulating wildly as the curtain falls.

On Thursday, at least, the lighting was almost too atmospheric. You could barely make out the blue-green necks. You could make out the hot summer couples: Chisako Oga and Sangmin Lee, Chae and Daniel Rubin, Fentroy and Craig. Haley Schwan and Chae were the summer outcasts; Jeffrey Cirio directed the summer violence; Seo Hye Han looked both pleased and panicked as Winter’s chosen one. But “The Canon of the Seasons” isn’t really about individual virtuosity. It’s not even about the seasons; omitting four of Vivaldi’s 12 concerto movements, Pite serves up a form of life in turmoil and in concert. It’s hard to say if it’s evolving.

THE FALL EXPERIENCE

Presented by Boston Ballet. At Citizens Bank Opera House, through November 3. Tickets $25-$215. 617-695-6955, www.bostonballet.org

Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at [email protected].

Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at [email protected].