Radiant

Justin Peck's "Heatscape" Comes to New York City Ballet

There was a time when Justin Peck made ballets to classical music—as a matter of fact I associate that time with some of his best works. One of those was “Heatscape,” which Peck made for Miami City Ballet in 2015, and has now been set on New York City Ballet. The music is Bohuslav Martinu’s wondrous first concerto for piano and orchestra. Martinu was a musical magpie, as well as an extrovert for whom enough was never enough. The concerto combines the verve of early Shostakovich with the brio of Neoclassical Stravinsky, all mixed together with a kind of musical exuberance, rich with layers, cadenza after cadenza, raucous fugues, and rainbow-hued washes of notes gushing from the piano, gorgeously played by Stephen Gosling. Peck responds to this music with real gusto, attack, and an atypical romanticism. It seems to be a ballet about love, perhaps influenced by the fact that his soon-to-be wife, Patricia Delgado, was in the original cast. The background, a kind of tattoo-sunburst-mural by Shepard Fairey, is vibrant and, bathed in Brandon Stirling Baker’s lighting, fills the stage with energetic waves. In its sportiness, playful deployment of a competitive threesome, and use of blossoming formations, “Heatscape” may be Peck’s most Ratmanskyan ballet, specifically reminiscent of “Concerto DSCH.” It also makes a series of endearing nods to Balanchine: an “Apollo-esque” sunburst of the legs, daisy chains, hops in sus-sous, as in “Concerto Barocco”. Its best quality is an effusiveness I haven’t seen in his more recent work. The dancers, including an explosive Naomi Corti, lyrical Miriam Miller, and bright, sharp David Gabriel and Jules Mabie, dance with a wonderful sense of freedom and presence—you feel the ballet is really about them. And in return, they fill it with their own warmth.