The Wall Street Journal - 02.10.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, October 2, 2019 |A

MUSIC REVIEW

The Beatles’ Stop Sign: ‘Abbey Road’ at 50

A remixed edition of the album reveals it as a crowning achievement—and an example of creativity cut short

LIFE & ARTS

rangy Andrew Scordato); by the fi-

nale, however, teeming with white-

tutu-clad women and black-outfit-

ted attendant men, the aura of an

enduring classic beamed forth.

The newest entries into the

company’s extensive repertory

proved, at best, more curious than

potentially classic. “The Shaded

Line,” Ms. Lovette’s oddly titled

20-minute ballet, her third for

NYCB, is something of a puzzle, an

ambitious, at times intriguing, ef-

fort for a cast of 24 that fails to

marshall its various, eccentric ele-

ments with reliable momentum.

Set to Tan Dun’s often dissonant

and boisterous “Fire Ritual” for

solo violin and orchestra, “Shaded

Line” has costume designs by Zac

Posen. It presents one central

dancer, soloist Georgina Pazcoguin

dressed in fitted white shirt and

black slacks, surrounded by 14

women and nine men costumed in

an array of peach tones, variously

trimmed to give the women cotton-

candy-like plumage and the men

sleekly detailed tunics.

In her singularity, the gamine-

wigged Ms. Pazcoguin, whose

moves project a restiveness, might

be a struggling choreographer or a

fashion designer laboring in her

workroom. As the rest of the cast

repeatedly poses in strict ballet

postures arrayed in neat lines, the

work’s featured figure, who re-

moves her black pointe shoes for a

while before donning them again at

the end, suggests a dance-maker in

her studio, sometimes instructively

acting as a partner for one of the

women, the stellar Unity Phelan.

At the end, Ms. Pazcoguin holds

a clear, formal ballet stance, per-

haps indicating that she’s co-opted

the canon embodied by the more

elaborately costumed ballet men

and women working around her.

The route, however, that Ms.

Lovette takes to reach her calm

punctuation meanders more than it

stays a course, making “The Shaded

Line” more fuzzy than focused.

Mr. Liang’s 22-minute “Lineage”

is set to Oliver Davis’s sometimes

soupy “Apollo” and is described in

a program essay as making refer-

ence to Balanchine’s Georgian cul-

tural roots. To these ends, Anna

Sui has provided the ballet with

Eastern European-style costuming,

FEW ALBUMS put the double bar
at the end of a band’s career as
conclusively as the Beatles’ “Abbey
Road,” released 50 years ago last
week and celebrated in a new re-
mixed 50th Anniversary Edition, in
several configurations, released by
Apple Corps Ltd./Capitol/UMe. Not
counting the brief “Her Majesty”—
a rejected song that an engineer
tacked onto the end of the reel
and was kept because the Beatles
found its appearance, after a long
pause, amusingly quirky—the al-
bum closes with “The End,” an un-
ambiguously named track that in-
cludes valedictory solos for all
four Beatles and a sweetly harmo-
nized closing lyric, “And in the
end, the love you take is equal to
the love you make.”
Paul McCartney has said that
he was inspired to write that phil-
osophical wrap-up by Shake-
speare’s practice of ending plays
with a rhymed couplet. How could
that fail to create an image of the
Beatles ringing down their own
curtain?
Still, whether the Beatles in-
tended “Abbey Road” as an elabo-
rate farewell, or whether it just
happened that way, has long been
a matter of debate, and Kevin
Howlett’s informative, lavishly il-
lustrated liner notes for the new
edition raise it afresh. (“Let It Be,”
though released in 1970, was re-
corded before “Abbey Road.”) Mr.
Howlett argues that it was not
meant as a good-bye, and quotes a
few of the Beatles saying
that they had not
thought the album would
be their last. Further evi-
dence, which Mr. Howlett
does not discuss, is an
extant tape of a meeting,
held just after the album
was completed, in which
the Beatles discussed
plans for a new album
and single.
But those plans were
soon scuttled. A few
days after the meeting,
John Lennon played a
concert with his Plastic
Ono Band, in Toronto,
and returned so ener-
gized by the experience
that he told the other
Beatles that he wanted
“a divorce,” effectively
breaking up the band unilaterally.
The idea of “Abbey Road” as a
self-conscious swan-song has well-
placed advocates. John Kurlander,
an engineer at the sessions, told
me that it was clear, if unspoken,
that this was the Beatles’ last al-
bum, adding that its original title,
“Everest,” though ostensibly a ref-

BYALLANKOZINN

erence to another engineer’s pre-

ferred brand of cigarettes, was the

Beatles’ way of saying that they

were stopping at their peak. They

had agreed to be flown to Mount

Everest to take the cover photo,

but when the mixing sessions ran

long, Mr. McCartney proposed hav-

ing the cover shot in Abbey Road,

the street outside the EMI

Recording Studios. (The stu-

dio complex was renamed

Abbey Road, in honor of the

album, in 1970.)

The pity is, “Abbey Road”

captures the Beatles on the

cusp of a new maturity in

their music-making. Their

playing is more fluid than

ever, with probing, contra-

puntal guitar lines, and

some fresh timbres, includ-

ing those of a primitive but

inventively used Moog syn-

thesizer. Their vocal harmo-

nies, always a hallmark, had

become both more sophisti-

cated and more playful.

All four contributed songs

that covered vast musical

ground—from Lennon’s soul-

ful, proto-Minimalist “I Want You

(She’s So Heavy),” and his other-

worldly fantasies, “Sun King” and

“Because,” to Ringo Starr’s child-

friendly “Octopus’s Garden” and

Mr. McCartney’s popsy but socio-

pathic “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

George Harrison’s “Something”

and “Here Comes the Sun” are

velatory as the outtakes included

on the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely

Hearts Club Band” and “White Al-

bum” anniversary sets, and several

just sound unpolished. But there is

much to be learned about the

Beatles’ process from these early

takes, some with unfinished lyrics

and different guitar lines.

Particularly telling are an early

take of “I Want You (She’s So

Heavy),” in which Billy Preston’s

organ contributions are far wilder

than those on the finished ver-

sion, and a trial edit of “The Long

One,” the working title for the

suite that closes the album, cre-

ated when “Her Majesty” ap-

peared between “Mean Mr. Mus-

tard” and “Polythene Pam.”

It may be that “Abbey Road” was

the perfect place for the Beatles to

stop—the group’s Everest, after all.

But hearing it in this crisp new re-

mix, it’s hard not to feel that it

ought to have been the beginning of

a new creative phase, not the end of

the band’s exquisite chemistry.

Mr. Kozinn writes about music for

the Journal.

among the best of his Beatles con-

tributions.

But it is Mr. McCartney’s idea of

turning a stack of his and Lennon’s

unfinished songs into a quasi-oper-

atic suite, with colorful characters,

thematic recapitulations and lush

vocal harmonies that remains the

defining achievement here.

In their new mix, Giles Martin

and Sam Okell upgrade what was

already the best-recorded sound

on any Beatles album. Vocal har-

monies are smoother and better

balanced, and instruments are

more texturally vivid and heftier.

Unlike last year’s “White Album”

remix, which occasionally restored

elements that had been submerged

in the original, there are no sur-

prises here. But Mr. Martin and

Mr. Okell have tweaked some of

the vocal and instrumental place-

ments, moving everything closer

to the center without eradicating

the stereo picture. The 5.1 and

Dolby Atmos surround mixes clar-

ify those textures further.

The Super Deluxe Edition also

includes 86 minutes of session ex-

tracts on two CDs. Few are as re-

The Beatles photographed in Tittenhurst Park on Aug. 22, 1969, above; the cover of ‘Abbey Road,’ below, is one of the most iconic in all of music.

APPLE CORPS LTD. (2)

New York
NEW YORK CITY BALLET’S current
run, through Oct. 13, marks the first
full season for the troupe—founded
in 1948 by George Balanchine and
Lincoln Kirstein—under the leader-
ship of Jonathan Stafford as artistic
director and Wendy Whelan as as-
sociate artistic director. The pro-
gramming, now half concluded, of
16 different ballets grouped into six
individual bills was planned before
Mr. Stafford’s and Ms. Whelan’s ap-
pointments in February, under the
guidance of Mr. Stafford and Justin
Peck, who were part of an interim
team in place since former director
Peter Martins retired in January
2018.
Each program has an overview ti-
tle. The one offering the season’s
two premiere works, Lauren
Lovette’s “The Shaded Line” and Ed-
waard Liang’s “Lineage,” and first
presented at the company’s eighth
Fall Fashion Gala, is called “Classic
NYCB,” where the new ballets are
framed by Jerome Robbins’s “Opus
19/The Dreamer” (1979, to
Prokofiev) and Balanchine’s “Sym-
phony in C” (1947, to Bizet).
Novice and veteran NYCB-goers
might well wonder about the bill’s
“classic” designation. The Robbins
work, which got a reliable but not
rich performance last week, is a
standard moody affair showcasing
a prominent male dancer and his
female counterpart; it passes
agreeably without amounting to
something suggesting lasting depth
despite its somewhat regular ap-
pearances in the repertory.
Balanchine’s symphonic staging
of Bizet’s music has been unforget-
tably stirring since its first outing
with NYCB in 1948. It was per-
formed here with a mix of verve
and fleetness in some parts (for ex-
ample Megan Fairchild and Joseph
Gordon in the first movement) and
with a lack of projection elsewhere
(such as in the fourth movement
led by Erica Pereira, partnered by a

in mostly deadly dull hues, espe-

cially once the eight women re-

move their foil-shiny skirts. In his

first original work for NYCB, Mr.

Liang’s choreography is dominated

by conventionally arranged duets

in which the men variously allow

their women to stick their legs this

way and that.

The one memorable, if merely

flashy, element in “Lineage” sends

NYCB’s eager firebrand, corps de

ballet dancer Roman Mejia, spin-

ning and bounding about for no

notable theatrical reason. Mark

Stanley’s lackluster lighting further

adds to the overall colorlessness of

the affair.

Bright spots in the season so far

have come from some notable de-

but performances. Most promi-

nently, 18-year-old Mira Nadon

breezed through the stylish show-

girl choreography of “Rubies” in

Balanchine’s “Jewels” with sensa-

tional physicality mated with a kit-

ten-soft demeanor, and, in one of

the trickier solos of “Raymonda

Variations,” she showed unerring

aplomb and radiance.

In a leading cast, all new to New

York, of Balanchine’s 1978 “Kam-

mermusik No. 2”—arranged with

what feels like a nonstop, accented,

pulsing thrust from start to fin-

ish—Emilie Gerrity, Jovani Furlan,

Ms. Phelan and Mr. Gordon kept

the pace smilingly and vigorously

throughout.

By the run’s end, “Masters at

Work: Balanchine & Cunningham”

will offer a rare NYCB outing for

modern-dance-innovator Merce

Cunningham’s limpid 1958 “Sum-

merspace,” which with Robert

Rauschenberg’s pointillist décor

and costumes and Morton Feld-

man’s austere music NYCB first

performed in 1966. One cast is

slated for the work’s four perfor-

mances, which should give the

dancers good time to plumb the

poetics of the often darting dance.

Mr. Greskovic writes about dance

for the Journal.

BYROBERTGRESKOVIC

ERIN BAIANO

Mira Nadon in ‘Rubies’ from George Balanchine’s ‘Jewels,’ one of the works in NYCB’s current run

DANCE REVIEW

At New York City Ballet,

New Beginnings Take the Stage