San Diego Ballet and Freilichs

Lyceum Space, Horton Plaza

2 p.m. today,
9 p.m. tomorrow and 2 p.m. Sunday.
$20
(619) 544-1000

What could ballet, the airy entertainment of the Russian aristocracy, possibly have in common with the music of the dispossessed – the earthbound, raucous tunes that livened up the shtetls of Eastern European Jews?

Not much, it turned out, in "Klezmer Ballet," the collaboration between San Diego Ballet and the Klezmer group Freilichs presented as part of this year's San Diego Jewish Arts Festival.

The good news, however, is how well it all worked. Thanks to savvy choices by festival artistic director Todd Salovey and San Diego Ballet choreographer Javier Velasco, "Klezmer Ballet" was a lively evening of music and dance.

Rather than trying to create an evening-length collaboration, Salovey and Velasco wisely began by showcasing each group.

Freilichs led off with a beguiling set of Klezmer tunes, most of them the kind of rousing, up-tempo pieces that get folks onto the dance floor at weddings and bar mitzvahs. But this versatile Tijuana-based group also showed Klezmer's more reflective side.

Leader Alexander Gourevitch, who was classically trained in his native Russia and plays with the Baja California Orchestra, can coax bittersweet, restrained melodies from his clarinet. He can also make the instrument wail, the kind of sound that migrated from Klezmer (through such musicians as Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw) into American jazz.

Gourevitch learned Klezmer from his father, and he's passed the knowledge to his daughter, Natalia Vostriakova, who joined him on violin. Some of the high points of Freilichs' set were when father and daughter carried on a musical conversation (ably backed by pianist Ella Korobchenko and percussionist Nik Rappoport).

For its showcase number, San Diego Ballet presented "Love: 20 Cents the First Quarter-Mile," a pas de deux honored this week with San Diego Dance Alliance Tommy Awards for Velasco's choreography and the performances by Stephanie Aubuchon and Gabriel Medina. Aubuchon and Medina brought a potent mix of delicacy and violence to this contemporary ballet in which a couple grapples with their desire and their ability to wound each other, the story told in a poem by Depression-era writer Kenneth Fearing.

Fearing's poem is a sort of pre-Beat epic, and guest artist Doug Jacobs would take first prize in any poetry slam for his dramatic delivery of Fearing's lines. Live, improvisational-style accompaniment by UCSD contrabass virtuoso Bertram Turetzky added the crowning touch to this dance-theatrical illusion.

Like a marriage counselor who tells two partners to appreciate rather than minimize their differences, Velasco had fun with the contrasts between ballet and Klezmer in "Klassical Klezmer," putting his dancers in the frothiest tutus and setting plenty of pointe work to the earthy, village-dance music.

A premiere created for this concert, "Klassical Klezmer" didn't always come off. Some of the six dancers looked as if they were struggling to hold their own against the infectious rhythm, and the most effective steps didn't fight the music but had a folk-dance feel; for instance, a series of rapid shifts between flat feet and a jazzy, knees-to-one-side pointe.

Still, Velasco kept things moving nicely, and Aubuchon and Elizabeth Apgar, in particular, seemed able to simultaneously embody the regalness of ballet and Klezmer's abandon. And the joyous finale, with tutued ballerinas pirouetting to a rollicking tune, had the audience clapping along.

Janice Steinberg is a San Diego arts writer.

Copyright 2002 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.