The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • N7

Sunday Telegram sunday, February 5, 2012 N7 WINTER DANCE GUIDE GENE SCHIAVONE Boston Ballet's Karine Seneca and Carlos Molina perform in Christopher Wheeldon's "Polyphonia." but not simple Boston Ballet explores three complex works in a new program CRITIC'S PICKS DANCE ACOUSTICAELECTRONICA "Bach meets a dance-club backbeat, Chopin meets trance, Carmen's habanera and Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' are blended with house music." That's the premise of this typically eclectic event at Oberon. And if live musicians, New York DJ the Wig, and go-go dancers aren't enough, there'll also be aerialists overhead. Feb. 10 and 17. Oberon, Cambridge.

866-811-4111, www.club oberon.com CONTRAPOSE DANCE Courtney Peix's Contrapose Dance is the Boston Center for the Arts' company in residence. This program, "groundwork," offers the Boston premiere of New York choreographer Sydney Skybetter's "Potemkin Piece," Peix's own "Ground," and a new work by Massachusetts choreographer Ma-riah Steele. Feb. 10-11. $15.

Calder-wood Pavilion Rehearsal Hall Boston Center for the Arts, Boston. 617-933-8600, www.bostontheatre scene.com JOSE MATEO BALLET THEATRE In the first of two winter repertory programs (the second is in March), Jose Mateo casts an eye toward Valentine's Day with "Classical Lovers," a trio of works. Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony features in "Courtly Lovers" (2003), J.S. Bach's Harpsichord Concerto in minor is the music for "Back to Bach" (2003), and Schubert's String Quintet in accompanies "Schubert Adagio" (1991). Feb.

10-26. $38. Sanctuary Theatre, Cambridge. 617-354-7467, www.ballettheatre.org STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY Nick Cave's songs are the backdrop to "Underland," a piece Stephen Petro-nio created for the Sydney Dance Company in 2003. This smaller-scaled (11 dancers) version debuted at the Joyce Theater in New York last year.

But music isn't the only backdrop; there's also a triptych of projected imagery by visual designer Ken Tabachnik and video artist Mike Daly. Feb. 10-12. $40. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

617-876-4275, www.worldmusic.org TRIPLE PLAY Back in the 1990s, when he was the resident choreographer for Boston Ballet, Daniel Pelzig showed a particular affinity for Tchaikovsky. For this annual showcase from Boston Conservatory, he'll debut a new piece set to Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in A minor. Rounding out the program are Cathy Young's jazzy "Zero Cool" and Doug Varone's "The Constant Shift of Pulse." The conservatory's music division will provide the live music. Feb. 16-19.

Boston Conservatory Theater, Boston. 617-912-9222, www.boston conservatory.edu PLAY WITH FIRE Playing with fire could mean trying to set J.S. Bach's iconic "Goldberg Variations," as Jor-ma Elo does in "Sharp Side of Dark." Or putting bare-chested men and women onstage, as Jin'Kylian does in "Bella Figura." Or making a dance out of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Ruby Tuesday," as Christopher Bruce does with "Rooster." Boston Ballet has already presented the first two works in this program without burning its fingers, so there's reason to think "Rooster" won't wind up in the frying pan. March 1-11. Boston Opera House, Boston.

617-695-6955, www.bostonballet.org FLAMENCO FESTIVAL 2012 This annual weekend presented by World MusicCRASHarts offers two dancers from the south of Spain: Rafaela Carrasco from Seville and Olga Per-icet from Cordoba. On March 2-3, Companfa Rafaela Carrasco will perform "Vamos al tiroteo" Get on With the set to Spanish songs collected by Federico Garcia Lorca and sung by La Argentinita in 1931. On March 4, Companfa Olga Pericet will follow with the dream-drenched "Rosa, metal ceniza" Metal, and March 2-4. Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston. 617-876-4275, www.worldmusic.org BALLET HISPANICO This New York company, headed by artistic director Eduardo Vilaro, brings three Boston premieres to the Celebrity Series: Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's "Mad'moi-selle" (2010), Ronald K.

Brown's "Espiritu Vivo" (2011), and Vilaro's own "Asuka" (2011), set to songs performed by Celia Cruz. March 9-11. Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston. 617-482-6661, www.celebrityseries.org BILL T. JONESARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY In "StoryTime," inspired by the one-minute stories of John Cage's 1959 "Indeterminacy," Bill T.

Jones will sit at a desk and read 50 to 70 mostly autobiographical short works while his company performs around him. The piece debuted last month in Montclair, N.J.; it's presented in Providence by FirstWorks. March 10. Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Providence. 401-421-2787, www.first-works.org TREY MclNTYRE PROJECT Can a contemporary ballet company find happiness by basing itself in Boise, Idaho, and touring America? Trey Mclntyre thinks so.

For this World MusicCRASHarts appearance, the Trey Mclntyre Project offers two Boston premieres. "Blue Until June" (2000) is set to Etta James songs: "One for My Baby," "At Last," "St. Louis Blues," and more. "The Sweeter End" (2011) is set to music by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. March 16-18.

$40. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. 617-876-4275, www.worldmusic.org JEFFREY GANTZ SIMPLY SUBLIME Presented by Boston Ballet. At: Boston Opera House, Feb. 9-19.

Tickets: 617-695-6955, www.bostonballet.org By Jeffrey Gantz GLOBE CORRESPONDENT "Fredi, can you come closer?" Russell Kaiser, one of Boston Ballet's four ballet masters, is talking to the company's principal pianist, Freda Locker, asking her to move her piano out of its corner and nearer to the dancers. "Always want to be closer to Stravinsky," he observes, walking over to help her. Kaiser is in the ballet's Grand Studio rehearsing George Balanchine's "Symphony in Three Movements," part of the "Simply Sublime" program that the company will open Thursday at the Boston Opera House. This is a piece that, like the Stravinsky to which it's set, is dear to his heart. "It was the ballet I asked to be the last ballet I danced," he says, recalling how he finished his performance career with New York City Ballet in 1996.

"But it was the middle piece on a program that ended with 'Brahms-Schoenberg and somebody in that piece got injured on my final day, and I had to go back into a role that I hadn't been doing for a while. I did get to dance 'Symphony' on my last program; it just wasn't my last dance." The piece has one of the most arresting openings in all of ballet: The curtain rises on a diagonal line of 16 women in white leotards and ponytails while Stravinsky's score seems to announce Armageddon. "They're not what you expect to find together," Kaiser notes. "Which I guess is what I find so beautiful about it. But then, almost instantaneously, you discover how in synch they really are." "Symphony" continues with a lot of WINTER CLASSICAL GUIDE the music being mathematical, and that's what he told the dancers, that there's up and down, straight lines, very clean lines.

There's no extra wrist flips or head rolls." Back in the Grand Studio, all eyes are glued to the company's newest ballet master, former principal Larissa Pono-marenko, as she rehearses the corps in Michel Fokine's "Les Sylphides," which will open "Simply Sublime." The piece is set to orchestrated versions of Chopin, nocturnes and mazurkas and waltzes. Ponomarenko says she danced it in school, at the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg, "and we traveled with that Amsterdam and Paris and performed on the Kirov stage." Boston Ballet, on the other hand, hasn't done "Les Sylphides" since 1976, so few dancers in the company have much experience with it. There's no real plot to "Les A young man, a poet, finds some sylphs dancing in a glade and joins them. But does that mean there's no story? "I always had a tendency to put a story line in everything," says Ponomarenko.

"Every movement, I think, describes something. Otherwise, there is no possibility for a dancer to engage the audience with what they do. Because dancers are really interesting onstage when they are preoccupied with the inner idea. But if they are just going through the movements, it doesn't ever give the same effect. And I think you can come up with a lot of stories here, even though it is very abstract." Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantzgmail.

com. JONATHAN WIGGSGLOBE STAFF Lighthouse," at the JFK Library. for an opera about the sea. "We are creating a world that will embrace the audience," said Albery in a recent phone interview. Davies wrote the libretto based on a book by Craig Mair, "The Lighthouse Boy," which tells the true story of the disappearance of three keepers from a pony-stepping (reminiscent of Balanchine's and Busby Berkeley-style shenanigans; there's a commedia deirarte-like pas de deux, and then an explosively geometric finale.

Boston Ballet did the piece just last May so why has the company programmed it again? "With a ballet this complicated," Kaiser explains, "your first time around, you spend a lot of time just trying to remember where everything goes and what all the counts are. Now that all that is more second nature, the dancers are happy to do it again, to take it to another level." Downstairs in Studio 6, ballet master Shannon Parsley is rehearsing Iia Cirio and Sabi Varga in a duet from the middle piece on the program, Christopher Wheeldon's "Polyphonia," which premiered at NYCB in 2001, and which Boston Ballet last did in 2007. It's a work for four couples set to 10 short piano works by Gyorgy Iigeti that range from a waltz to a scherzo to a wedding dance. "There's all these different things going on in the first movement. You can imagine many voices speaking and chaos, and it's all about disorder," Parsley says.

"And then it comes all together at the very end." Like "Symphony in Three Movements," "Polyphonia" calls for a lot of counting. Wheeldon, Parsley says, "liked Thomas Hase, lighting designer for "The lia Koo. BLO's British-born music director David Angus will conduct. "The Lighthouse" is the latest offering in BLO's Opera Annex program, created to stage productions in alternative, non-theatrical venues around the city. With a panoramic view of Boston Harbor, Smith Hall provides an evocative setting to it 1 BLO brings 'Lighthouse' to JFK Museum By Harlow Robinson GLOBE CORRESPONDENT In New England we love our lighthouses.

Beacons of safety in the stormy dark, they adorn the jagged coastline like timeless monuments to our maritime history. But lighthouses, especially in the pre-automation era, also gave rise to more unsettling feelings and questions. Who lives there, anyhow? What weird phenomena might lighthouse keepers witness, or imagine, during those long days and nights of lonely vigil, fog, and spray? These questions also fascinated distinguished British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. For many years, Davies, 77, has lived on Sanday one of the remote Orkney Islands north of Scotland, where lighthouses are crucial fixtures of the ruggedly romantic landscape. In 1979, Davies transformed his interest in local maritime lore into music when he completed "The Lighthouse," a chamber opera in a prologue and one act.

Since its 1980 premiere at the Edinburgh Festival, "The Lighthouse" has become one of the most popular of all 20th-century operas, having been performed by more than 100 different companies. This week, Boston Lyric Opera will present four performances in Smith Hall at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. British stage director Tim Albery will make his BLO debut, as will set and costume designer Camel flexatones, a referee's whistle, and a guitar. During the prologue, the solo horn part intones the questions being asked of the officers.

Much of the vocal writing unfolds in jagged declamatory recitative. Albery, the director, knows that "the music is fiendishly difficult. The three singers are onstage for the entire opera, and they have to gradually go insane. So while they must keep track of very intense and complex music with their rational brains, they must also express extreme emotion and irrationality." The decision to produce the opera at the JFK Library was made before Albery was engaged to direct. Having worked at many of the world's leading opera houses, he is staging "The Lighthouse" for the first time, and he admits that Smith Hall "is not the easiest space to do a show in." There is no orchestra pit, no stage, and the acoustics were not designed for music.

The distant lights of the city will be visible through the enormous windows. Developing the staging is "a matter of discovery," he said. "We're still trying things out." Over the course of his career, Albery has staged numerous productions of the operas of Benjamin Britten, widely acknowledged as an important influence on Davies's music. The director sees a particularly strong connection between Britten's "Turn of the Screw" (produced by BLO Opera Annex two seasons ago at the Castle on Columbus Avenue) and "The Lighthouse." Both combine elements of mystery and ghost stories, and unfold in a stream-of-consciousness style. "They have the same kind of sound world," Albery observed.

"But the combination of legal and poetic language in 'The Lighthouse' is even more disarming and unique." Harlow Robinson can be reached at harlo mindspring. com. BOSTON LYRIC OPERA Peter Maxwell Davies: 'The Lighthouse' At: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum Feb. 8-12.

617-542-6772, boxofficeblo.org lighthouse on the desolate Flannan Isles. When the supply ship Hesperus arrived as scheduled on Boxing Day in 1900, no trace of the men was found. The crew entered the lighthouse to find the living quarters deserted, beds still unmade, as if the inhabitants had just stepped out. Theories were advanced to explain the keepers' disappearance: that one keeper was an alcoholic who pushed the others over a cliff; that a love affair among the men went bad; even that they were abducted by extraterrestrials. More likely, per the conclusion of the official investigation: They were carried off from a landing site by a rogue wave.

In fashioning his libretto, Davies took liberties with the known facts. He changed the name of the lighthouse to Fladda, and combined scenes from the inquiry with imagined scenes of the three keepers before their disappearance: Sandy (tenor), Blazes (baritone) and Arthur (bass). The singers who portray the keepers also take on the roles of the three officers of the Hesperus questioned at the court of inquiry in the opera's prologue. The cast of the BLO production features tenor John Bellem-er, baritone Christopher Burchett (in his BLO debut), and bass David Cushing. The dense modernist musical language of "The Lighthouse" presents a challenge to both the three singers and the 12 members of the chamber orchestra.

The instrumentation is highly untra-ditional, including a dozen different percussion instruments, a piano, a celesta, an out-of-tune upright piano, several.