I had planned to go see Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” last night at the Metropolitan Opera (the best deal in town is the $20 rush-ticket orchestra seat one can buy two hours before a Monday-Thursday performance this season at the Met), but Tim Tompkins called to say he had an extra ticket to the New York City Ballet. We saw Russian Seasons, choreographed for the 2006 spring/summer season, by Alexei Ratmansky. It was second on the bill but was a bit gimmicky for my tastes. The program opened with Christopher Wheedlon’s Klavier which he choreographed last year to the Adagio movement in Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Piano Sonato in B-flat Major. Balanchine, New York City Ballet’s founder, once remarked that one should shy away from Beethoven when creating dance, and as always he had a point. It is difficult to inhabit Beethoven in a physical way. Listening to Beethoven is quite literally a heady experience. Though exquisite, Klavier finally seemed more like an idea for a dance than a fully realized piece of choreography. Sometimes beauty is not enough. In dance it must be accompanied by an almost mathematical genius as well. That was what Balanchine - one of the great geniuses of any sort who strode through the 20th Century - possessed. It was as if Wheedlon were attempting his own take on the first movement - Melancholic - of Balanchine’s 1940 masterpiece, The Four Temperments, which was the final offering of the program and seemed a bit under-rehearsed.

I had planned again tonight, on Valentine’s Day, to go alone to the Metropolitan Opera to see Janacek’s “Jenufa.” But I ran into an old buddy, Harlan Bratcher, the president of Armani Exchange, Monday and he said he and his boyfriend were having a Valentine’s Day dinner tonight for all their single friends - about 20 of us in all - who seem always to be complaining that they can’t find anyone interesting to date. I couldn’t turn down that invitation since yet another February 14th has rolled around to remind me of my solitary existence. It’s time to escape my own Melancholic movement. If there’s a cute guy there maybe I’ll decide that beauty is enough after all.

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