A haunting masterpiece: Northern Ballet’s Adagio Hammerklavier reviewed

One could soundly advise any choreographer to avoid music so transcendentally great in itself that dance can add nothing except banal images. Only a handful of exceptions sneak past the rule: MacMillan’s setting of Song of the Earth, perhaps, and also Hans van Manen’s Adagio Hammerklavier, his audacious attempt to visualise the infinitely slow movement of Beethoven’s epic piano sonata Op. 106.

Northern Ballet has honourably revived this haunting masterpiece as part of its autumnal triple bill, and its impact overshadows the two novelties that frame it. What is its secret? Van Manen doesn’t attempt to illustrate the music or even to suggest any emotional import: the movement of six dancers in white is entirely chaste and abstracted, an act of entranced listening devoid of any strenuous virtuosity or personality.

Next to it Benjamin Ella’s Joie de Vivre seemed pretty and pleasant but a bit pointless: a riff on the innocent girls-meet-boys camaraderie underlying Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering that comes to life only in two sparky pas de trois.