Mozart Dances, which finally arrived here via Cal Performances last Thursday, achieved the impossible by exceeding its rapturous reviews. Jane Glover, conducting the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and joined by Garrick Ohlsson and Yoko Nazaki on piano, gave a performance of warm dynamics and perfect unity. Ohlsson played each of the three Mozart works as if he and the dancers had spent their entire lives together, instead of rehearsing days before. Mozart Dances confirmed that Morris, who has sustained his rise from enfant terrible to, at 51, a legendary modernist, can pretty much set any moves he wants to classical music and, on the Mark Morris Dance Group, it will come out looking magnificent.
Evening-length and plotless, Mozart Dances, which premiered in 2006, is labeled by its parts: Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 11 becomes "Eleven," followed by an intermission, then the Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos ("Double"), another intermission, and the Piano Concerto No. 27 ("Twenty-seven"). Superficially, the dance’s intentions seem as modest as its titles. At the outset, everyone appears in front of Howard Hodgkin's backdrop of feathery black smudges, and then the men leave "Eleven" to the women. "Double" is all men, and "Twenty-seven" brings back the entire company, plus a couple of dancers we haven't noticed before.
Interestingly, the women's "Eleven" dance is more assertive than "Double," for the men. "Eleven" makes Lauren Grant, a tiny woman who dances huge, the prima ballerina. Wearing a more solid version of the other dancers' gauzy black gowns over bikinis, Grant, curly blonde, fleet of foot, loose of hip, may be best known around here as Marie in Morris' The Hard Nut. Here as there, she's strong, blithe, initiating. She sets the conditions of the movement — grounded and flexed in the legs, pulled up in the torso — even as the corps around her establishes the phrasing, gentle and rocking, but broken with sharply focused turns.
Seeing some of the moves — a run that looks like it's from Paul Taylor's Esplanade, a moment when Grant lies on the floor as if she's in Balanchine's Serenade, and then an iconic pose, one arm up, the other out at the side, that feels like it's from the Queen of the Wilis in Giselle — you wonder if this was deliberate mining, or whether it's just that great moments, in dance as in music, have lives of their own.
Janice Berman, SFCV’s senior dance critic, has been a dance writer and reviewer since 1978, beginning at Newsday and New York Newsday. She has written on dance for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Ballet Review, and Dance Magazine, where she was editor-in-chief.