The Mark Morris Dance Group at the Mostly Mozart Festival on Thursday, August 5.
I knew there was a reason I kept attending performances of Mark Morris’s choreography. Even when a particular work didn’t click for me, I always saw something intriguing there—the musicality, the pared-down aesthetic—and now I’ve finally stumbled across a Morris work I love passionately and wholeheartedly. In L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed it Moderato, all the characteristics of his style that I dislike fade into the background, and the traits I admire move to the forefront. And despite the fact that it’s a long nonnarrative, two-act work, it’s never dull. L’Allegro is a gorgeous mosaic—with funny, playful passages and sad, delicate passages; subtle, thoughtful passages and joyful, exuberant passages—and all the disparate little tiles somehow fit together with perfect coherence, becoming more beautiful and revealing new truths in one another’s company.
Much Review About Nothing 