Higher Authority

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2023

LETTER FROM THE GOLAN

Higher authority

On security in the Golan, Israeli politics & settler culture.

Israel’s judicial woes exploded just as we were approaching Ben Gurion Airport for our flight home. This time, it wasn’t Syria or Lebanon, Iran or Egypt, or any of the other bad actors surrounding us making trouble, but Israel itself. The protesters became more numerous throughout the day as we neared Tel Aviv. Almost all of them were against the judicial reforms promoted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They took to the highway overpasses and often to the highways themselves. They shuttered the national parks and even staged walkouts at many of the country’s McDonald’s—cutting off our visit to the archeological site of Caesarea, and my family’s meal options, before takeoff.

That the general strike then closed down Ben Gurion International for several hours speaks to the long shadow of the country’s short history. As the founding prime minister of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion had more pressing concerns in 1948 than load-testing his nascent country’s governmental architecture, and he left it without a proper constitution. The proposed judicial reforms, and the controversy surrounding them, are the consequences of this legislation delayed, legislation denied, now quickly boiling over into an un-constitutional crisis, right as the country is about to celebrate its diamond jubilee.

It was with some irony that we largely avoided the protests during our final days in the country by touring the Golan Heights. To this day this northeast corner of Israel, taken from Syria in the Six-Day War in 1967, remains contested Israeli territory by all but the United States. In March 2019, President Trump affirmed Israel’s claim to the region. The move elicited condemnation from the European members of the U.N. Security Council and much celebration here. In honor of the U.S. announcement, Netanyahu broke ground on a new settlement named Trump Heights (Ramat Trump) east of the Jordan River, on the road to the former Syrian military headquarters, which has become a brutalist ruin now covered in graffiti. A monument to Trump marks the entrance to the settlement with the sculpture of a bald eagle taking flight from a menorah.

A sign in the Golan warning of the presence of land mines. Photo: James Panero. 

The contested status of the Golan has left the region, which in a brief span borders Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, largely unpopulated since the disruptions of 1967. The battle-scarred hills are still littered with Syrian bunkers and unexploded mines, over which there now falls a contingent peace. One morning we took an old Land Rover up from the Hula Valley into the Height’s rutted dirt roads. “Where are we?” I asked our driver, Royi. “You are in the Middle East,” he replied.

Wildflowers now grow around the rusted barbed wire that crisscrosses the hillside and the numerous signs that read “danger mines!” Mustard flowers, poppies, and tall grasses provide abundant food for the mix of bees, cattle, and wild animals that now call these slopes home. Beef from the Golan is free-range, save for the minefields, and results in some of the most flavorful steak you can find—one evening I dined on a local T-bone and Golan wine at a horse ranch just north of ancient Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee.

Once up on the heights’ plateau, we pulled over. We got out of the vehicle, being sure not to wander off the road. Royi brewed a tea of Golan lemongrass on a camp stove he balanced on the hood of his vehicle. He peeled and handed around slices of local orange—the smell of orange blossoms is a particular treat when walking through the groves in the valley. A hoopoe, the national bird of Israel, with its orange crown and a winged jacket of black-and-white feathers, foraged in a bush by the side of the road. In the distance, we spotted a family of boar circling in the shade of a tree. A herd of Nubian ibex, a vulnerable species that has found its own refuge in Israel, ran along the ridgeline.

An Iron Dome launch site in the Golan, with Mount Hermon in the distance. Photo: James Panero. 

As we continued up to the present Syrian border, we passed Israeli bases and active IDF training grounds. “Iron Dome,” Royi pointed to our right. There they were: mobile sand-colored missile launchers just off the side of the road, trained in the direction of Lebanon. “TANK CROSSING” read another sign nearby. It is a warning that I learned needs to be taken at its word. Our guide during our Israeli stay, a spritely Golan homesteader named Lior, lost all of his bees six years ago when an Israeli tank ran over his forty hives during nighttime training maneuvers. He restored a few of the hives and gave us a jar of his personal supply to take home. He would need the rest in this land of milk and honey for his growing family of “only four” children, as he likes to say.

For lunch we stopped at a farm in central Golan at Moshav Kidmat Tzvi, one of those Jewish cooperative communities, founded in 1981, still deemed illegal by what Israel’s antagonists like to call “international law.” Here the owners, Tami and Babi, served a meal of local abundance: platters of fish and pasta, hummus and cheese, and fruits and vegetables, paired with their homegrown olive oil and wine. The building is made entirely of recycled materials. Tami sits down at our table to explain their history as her cat rubs against my leg. The walls are covered with homemade glass and artwork. A tree trunk grows up in the middle of the room and exits to the outdoors through a hole in the ceiling. Babi offers me a brandy distilled from his own apples. From the charoset and maror of the Passover seder plate, food has always held a central place in Jewish symbolism. Now a fresh cornucopia, shared at this Israeli table, replaces the bitter herbs of Egypt with the succulent fruits of aliyah, or “going up,” to Zion.

This frontier attracts settlers with the same pioneer spirit that you might have found in Oklahoma Territory over a century ago. These are times when Israel resembles nothing less than a young and vibrant United States. Today the settlers vary in their politics. Some are old leftists, the secular holdouts of the kibbutzim. Others are religious idealists, fulfilling what they see as their own manifest destiny. What they share is a spirit for Zionism, the civic virtue that has propelled this nation, despite its conflicts and divisions, to astonishing heights in under a century.

Up at the border, the contrast with these achievements can be most striking. Through its industry and energy, against the odds, Israel has shocked the world with its successes. The triumphs have only brought shame to its Arab neighbors, who have mainly shown themselves to be impotent and corrupt. Beyond the demilitarized zone, the abundance of the Golan ends in a sharp line and gives way to the denuded hills of Syria and Lebanon. On the flank of Mount Avital, with the snow-covered peak of Mount Hermon in the distance, I felt a cold wind blowing across the ridgeline. Here in the late afternoon we overlooked Camp Ziouani, the DMZ outpost operated by the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force—the “useless nations,” as Israelis call them. From all around, a chorus of manic laughter emanated out of the grass. “Jackals,” Lior told me. I was unsure if he was referring to the animals or the Hezbollah bases just beyond.

The Israeli border, with Syria in the distance. Photo: James Panero.

For anyone who doubts the strategic necessity of the Golan to Israel, just visit the old Jewish settlements clinging to the hillsides to the west of the Jordan River. Before 1967, the Syrian border ran right in front of them, straight down the middle of the Hula Valley. The line split the region in two and placed Israeli villagers within sniper range of the militarized Syrian positions overshadowing their settlements from the east. As it is, the region can still be besieged by rocket fire from Lebanon and was under heavy bombardment as recently as 2006. At the time, Hezbollah was firebombing Israel with over two hundred rockets a day. Israel’s aerial fire brigade flew out of Mahanayim airfield, just down the hill from our bed-and-breakfast in Rosh Pina.

The charming village of our stay, a stone’s throw from the city of Safed, is something of the Plymouth of Zionism. The village was settled in the 1880s as one of the first Jewish homesteads in what was then the Ottoman Vilayet of Beirut. The name Rosh Pina, meaning “cornerstone,” refers to Psalm 118:22—“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” It speaks to the foundational aspirations of its pioneers. Baron Edmond de Rothschild underwrote the town’s agricultural development, purchasing land to grow crops, which made it one of the region’s first self-sustaining Jewish communities. The eminent Victorian Laurence Oliphant, who gathered support from Christian Zionists for such settlements, visited soon after in 1886, writing:

These consisted of twenty-three Roumanian and four Russian families, numbering in all one hundred and forty souls. The greater number were hard at work on their potato-patches when I arrived, and I was pleased to find evidences of thrift and industry. A row of sixteen neat little houses had been built, and more were in process or erection. Altogether this is the most hopeful attempt at a colony which I have seen in Palestine.

The future of Israel now seems a world away from these pioneers. The risk today is that many in the younger generation, increasingly wealthy and cosmopolitan and centered around the booming tech corridor of Tel Aviv, are seeking to align themselves with the same liberal international order that has proven to offer false shelter for the Jewish people time and again. When they appeal to “democracy” in protesting Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, for example, what they really oppose is his attempt to rein in an unaccountable judicial elite; part of Netanyahu’s proposed reforms would align their nominating process with something closer to the democratic American system. In opposing the legislation of the Israeli Knesset—put forward by its elected members—Israel’s overreaching judiciary has long weakened the country’s borders and thwarted its efforts at counterterrorism. In 2007, Judge Robert H. Bork even noted that Aharon Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel, had written “a textbook for judicial activists.”

The Golan plateau. Photo: James Panero.

Beyond such policy disagreements, the mass protests are really an attempt to oppose the Netanyahu government through mob rule by drawing on the progressive shock tactics of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. “Whatever individual protesters may have told themselves, the real purpose of the uprising was not to stop judicial reform. It was to get rid of Netanyahu,” wrote Melanie Phillips in the Jewish News Syndicate. “Protesters absurdly claimed that the reform program—proposed by a democratically elected government—was a ‘coup.’ . . . That is the antithesis of democracy.”

Nation-building is tough business. Israel’s burden has been to build one under a contemporary spotlight while being reprimanded by many of the same world powers whose actions necessitated the creation of the Jewish State in the first place. Here is a country the size of New Jersey that is regularly under attack by one or more of its neighbors. Israel’s unabashed struggle for self-survival has been a defining characteristic of its history and the fire fueling its great successes. As Golda Meir, Israel’s iron-lady prime minister, famously said: “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.” In the Golan Heights, at least, that spirit lives on.

Up the Riverside

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2023

Up the riverside

On New York’s Riverside Drive & Park.

Walking up New York’s Riverside Drive can be like visiting a lost civilization, like seeing the streets of Ostia Antica or Old Jerusalem. The curve of the drive, a departure from the street grid on the far west side of Manhattan, traces the landscape as it follows the bluffs overlooking the Hudson River. A procession of some two dozen monuments lines the road, memorializing the figures of history in a classical vocabulary. Apartment dwellings of nine to twelve stories in brick, terra-cotta, and stone recall the French, Dutch, and English Renaissance, with punctuations of the Gothic and the Châteauesque. Meanwhile a 370-acre park between the drive and the river offers several miles of recreation and waterfront trails while also accommodating a subterranean railroad and a vehicular parkway.

Riverside is the result of sixty years of urban development that ended abruptly less than a century ago. Yet it now seems as foreign to us as the product of another civilization. Its architectural language has since been largely abandoned. Its legacy of craftsmanship—its terra-cotta moldings and stone carvings and copper cornices—has mostly been lost. Thousands of residents still call it home and live among its relics—I count myself among them—but Riverside Drive could never be recreated today.

Despite its reputation as a “modern” skyscraper city, there are of course many old streets in New York, as well as other historic residential districts. Something of the innocent age of Henry James and Edith Wharton can be found in the townhouses of Greenwich Village. On the Upper East Side, Fifth Avenue and then Park Avenue led the parade of the city’s aristocracy uptown, while Central Park West faced them with some of the finest pre-war “hotel apartment” towers in the city.

The Schwab mansion and its surroundings on Riverside Drive, 1906–45. Photo: Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. 

Still, for its harmony of landscape, function, and design, Riverside is a special achievement. “Heaven on the Hudson” is what the author Stephanie Azzarone calls the neighborhood in her new book on the “Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park.”1 I would not disagree. “In this part of the city,” she begins,

there is so much that has always been the same and little that is new or modern. On the façades of buildings large and small, intricately carved details above doors and windows speak to character formed a century or more ago.

A full tour of Riverside would begin, as Azzarone’s does, at West Seventy-second Street, its southern border, and head north. At one time the drive extended from here all the way to Dyckman Street in Inwood, at the northernmost tip of Manhattan. Though a northbound section of the Henry Hudson Parkway now interrupts it, today you could still walk the drive some six miles to about 180th Street, to the ramps of the George Washington Bridge. Alternatively you can follow the park’s riverfront esplanade to the “Little Red Lighthouse,” the one confronted with the arrival of the “Great Gray Bridge” in Hildegarde Swift’s famous 1942 children’s book. Azzarone’s tour, complete with photography by Robert F. Rodriguez, ends at the start of the first Riverside Drive extension at West 129th Street, where the topography drops into Manhattan Valley and F. Stuart Williamson’s elegant elevated viaduct of 1898 connects the drive to the heights of 135th Street.

But first, take a detour south from Seventy-second Street to the new construction on Riverside Boulevard, a recent extension of the drive, and consider what we tend to build today. A row of postmodern high-rises leads to a cluster of glass-shard skyscrapers. These final fishbowl condominiums offer the latest in high-gloss finishes and amenities. Their modernist forms are impressive from afar and imperious up close. But of course they would not be built this way if they did not appeal to today’s apartment dwellers. Fully exposed to an elevated highway in front of them, their designs also reveal the two great shortcomings of contemporary development: the open floor-plan and the glass curtain-wall. Both tend to be coveted by the high-end condo buyer. It also happens that these features greatly reduce building costs, as fewer materials and on-site expertise are required to erect prefabricated glass components. As a developer once explained to me, their widespread appeal is the great lie of his trade.

North of Seventy-second Street it’s a different story. Rather than anticipate a future wiped clean of antique residue, Riverside Drive looked to the past to reflect the weight of history in the monumentality of its designs. Bookended by the 1902 Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at Eighty-ninth Street and the General Grant National Memorial of 1897 at 122nd Street (see my “Monumental madness” in The New Criterion of April 2020), there are memorials dedicated to firemen, to women’s health, to Joan of Arc, and to a range of others that all add their own gravitas to the park and drive (see “Gallery chronicle,” January 2016). All are products of the “City Beautiful” movement of the turn of the last century. Stop by Warren & Wetmore’s Robert Ray Hamilton Fountain of 1906 at Seventy-sixth Street, designed for the watering of horses. Or walk to the John Merven Carrère Memorial of 1919 at Ninety-ninth Street, a small terrace dedicated to the architect of the main branch of the New York Public Library—Carrère died in an automobile accident just months before the library’s opening—designed by his partner Thomas Hastings.

The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, ca. 1910.

Along the way, look up to the blue glazed terra-cotta window treatments of the Peter Stuyvesant Apartments of 1919 at Ninety-eighth Street, a building developed by James T. Lee, the grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Consider the curving façades of the Colosseum and the Paterno, apartment buildings by the architectural firm of Schwartz & Gross, both completed in 1910, at a bend in the drive at 116th Street. Then look back to 103rd Street to the stepped finial—at one time a glistening copper-clad stupa—of the Master Apartments, originally built for the followers of the guru artist Nicholas Roerich (see “Gallery chronicle,” November 2013). This art-deco tower, one of the last constructed during the drive’s building boom, circumvented the city’s height and fire regulations by foregoing individual apartment kitchens and calling itself a hotel.

In the years after the Civil War, history weighed heavily as New York took on new responsibilities as a global capital. For a century prior, scattered farmhouses, villages, and “country seats” for downtown residents had gone up near the heights above the river. The early landowning families here, the De Lanceys, Apthorps, and Livingstons, still lend their names to modern Manhattan. Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Raven” while renting the second floor of the Brennan Farmhouse next to what is now West Eighty-fourth Street in 1844. Yet even as the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 laid down the Manhattan street grid, development was slow on the Upper West Side, where the rocky terrain was difficult to clear. This was especially true between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues, where the steep and irregular drop from the heights to the river made conforming to the new grid especially challenging for residential development.

In 1866 Andrew Haswell Green proposed an act in the state legislature for the development of a park in the drop-off between these two avenues. Fresh from their successes to the east, the Central Park commissioners set about acquiring the land above Seventy-second Street from the heights to the river—or at least up to the riverfront railroad tracks laid down in 1848 to bring freight to downtown Manhattan (a railyard was located just south of Seventy-second).

In 1873 the commissioners wisely turned to Frederick Law Olmsted to design the project. Eleventh eventually became West End Avenue, while the docklands at Twelfth were absorbed into the park’s jurisdiction in 1894. In between, Olmsted used the contours of the heights to determine the sinuous shape of a new drive to bisect the two, carving out plots for development to the east that could overlook a park sloping down towards the river. His design made the most of the heights’ commanding views of the Hudson and the shoreline beyond. In two sections where the drop-off was too steep to connect his drive to the grid’s side streets, Olmsted split off a narrow carriage road, in the process creating extra “island parks.”

Olmsted “considered the existing grades and contours, the existing plantings and views, and designed a winding drive,” writes the Landmarks Preservation Commission. It was all a

seemingly simple, but for its time, remarkable design concept, which combined into a single unified design a picturesque park taking advantage of the natural attributes of a dramatic site and an urban parkway providing a landscaped environment for a residential community.

Starting in 1880, as the drive and park first opened, some twenty detached mansions went up, but this initial boom of the New York “Four Hundred” proved to be a bust. New York’s aristocracy mostly went to the Upper East Side. By 1902 a majority of the lots still remained vacant. Instead, it was the arrival of the Ninth Avenue Elevated and then the irt subway (now the 1, 2, and 3 lines) in 1904 that brought up from the crush of downtown a new business class eager for the drive’s riverside views. Developers were there to appeal to them, first with speculative row houses and, soon thereafter, with a proliferation of large rental apartments in multi-unit dwellings.

Outside of the overcrowded tenement, the apartment or “French flat” was a new concept for the upper-class New Yorker at the turn of the twentieth century. Beaux-Arts design helped to convey their respectability, as ornate lobbies and building attendants could now offer aesthetics and services surpassing those of a detached single-family home, with less expense.

The limestone façade of 190 Riverside Drive, constructed in 1908, at West Ninety-First Street. Photo: James Panero.

Over the following decades the class appeal of Riverside ebbed and flowed. During the Great Depression many spacious apartments were broken up into much smaller tenements, some even to single-room occupancy (SRO) units. It didn’t help that the open railroad tracks at the far edge of the park blocked the waterfront with an odoriferous cargo destined for the city’s meatpacking district.

It might be said that among developers, Robert Moses is now loathed by the Left nearly as much as Donald Trump. Both unabashedly appealed to the upper-middle-class city, and both focused on the future of Riverside. Moses’s great legacy here was to cover the Riverside tracks in a public-works project that cost nearly five times as much as the Hoover Dam. His 1934 West Side Improvement Plan brought in four million cubic yards of landfill and extended the shoreline 250 feet, doubling its size and turning Riverside into a genuine park while adding a new vehicular parkway. (More recently, even after federal funds had been allocated, a similar effort to bury the highway south of Seventy-second Street was blocked by Congressman Gerald Nadler due to his hatred of Trump, who controlled nearby development rights.)

Riverside’s final salvation came in the co-op conversion plans of the 1970s and ’80s. Hamstrung by the city’s market-killing rent regulations, landlords found ways to unburden their indebted structures onto their tenants. The process created thousands of small homeowners newly invested in the future of the neighborhood. As Riverside adopted a conservancy funding model in 1986 along the same lines as Central Park, neighborhood volunteers spread out every weekend to replant and fix up and tend to the dirt hills then covering the park’s grounds. Their efforts are still a defining characteristic of Riverside today.

Over time,” Azzarone concludes,

there have been multiple Riverside Parks. In the nineteenth century, Olmsted’s version was devoted to the pure enjoyment of nature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the City Beautiful’s park focused on monumental aesthetics. In the 1930s, Moses introduced the Riverside Park of recreation.

Any future for Riverside must still look to the past with reverence. Given present circumstances, such an impulse is the one most in need of renewal.

1.   Heaven on the Hudson: Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park, by Stephanie Azzarone; Empire State Editions, 240 pages, $39.95.

With Much Fanfare

THE NEW CRITERION, February 1, 2023

With much fanfare

On the City Ballet’s premiere of Copland Dance Episodes, choreographed by Justin Peck.

The music of Aaron Copland might as well be the soundtrack of the American century. From Billy the Kid (1938) to Appalachian Spring (1944), Rodeo to Fanfare for the Common Man (both 1942), the compositions are energetic, expansive, hopeful. You envision birds at daybreak, sunlight on the prairie, cowboys dancing with the farmers’ daughters and farmers dancing with the ranchers’ gals. The spiritedness of the works lends itself to the ballet stage. So it’s no surprise that some of Copland’s most recognizable pieces were originally commissioned for choreography: Billy the Kid for Eugene Loring via Lincoln Kirstein, Rodeo for Agnes de Mille, and Appalachian Spring for Martha Graham. In 1959 Copland even returned to ballet with the commission of his Dance Panels for Jerome Robbins and the New York City Ballet.

Copland’s repertoire has become so iconic that it might now seem overly tied to time and place, like some grand old Hollywood Western forever in black and white. Justin Peck, the resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet, has taken on the challenge of introducing new color to these works. In 2015 he choreographed his Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes, inspired by a staging of de Mille’s original ballet at American Ballet Theatre.

This season he returns with Copland Dance Episodes, an ambitious work that premiered at City Ballet on January 26. Staged in twenty-two “episodes,” the seventy-five-minute piece presented without intermission is not only Peck’s first “full evening” work for the company but also NYCB’s first full-fledged plotless ballet since George Balanchine premiered Jewels way back in 1967.

Balanchine, Copland, Graham, de Mille, Robbins—the ancestors weigh heavy on such an undertaking. Peck responds by stripping away the heft of narrative ballet for discursive abstraction, through a tumbling of episodes with sonic and choreographic connections that are at most evanescent and fleeting. A thigh slap here, a head bob there, that’s all we get as the work floats free of the classical narrative of the American story.

With lighting, scenery, and costumes all tuned up to high color, Copland Dance Episodes is at its best in exploring the chromatic vision that weaves together the composer’s uplifting piecework. In the program, the set designer Jeffrey Gibson states that his art “fuses his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and experience of living in Europe, Asia, and the USA with references that span club culture, queer theory, fashion, politics, literature, and art history.” This boilerplate reads like an application to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Nevertheless Gibson’s colorful painted drop curtain introduces the ballet in Sixties hard-edge abstraction crossed with television test patterns. Ellen Warren picks up on these complementary saturations for her two-toned leotards while Brandon Stirling Baker employs high-index illumination with mostly subtle, and at one time jarring, lighting transitions.

Russell Janzen and Miriam Miller in Justin Peck’s Copland Dance Episodes. Photo: Erin Baiano.

Peck tends to be at his best in ensemble work, as multiple movements on stage coalesce and dissolve. As we hear those epic opening chords of Fanfare, Dance Episodes opens with the full company covered in tulle. A slogan, “The only way out is through,” is written on the drop and also serves as a title for this opening episode. At first the dancers appear frozen like mannequins under plastic wrap, there to be dusted off and reanimated. Then they walk off, leaving only one—the “common man,” no longer elevated, but merely lost in the crowd.

We get some hints at narrative through several such vignettes: racers at the starting line, ticket takers at the turnstyle, a flower in bloom. Fingers left pointing up at the end of one scene are touched ET-style in the next (in an episode called, yes, “Phone Home.”) With titles such as “Etch-a-sketch” and “Kismet,” the episodes are tumbleweeds and rodeos as seen in a Sunday morning cartoon, the past visualized in the light of the screen pixel. 

Peck, now aged thirty-five, conveys all the autistic affectation of his millennial generation. It’s a case of too much FaceTime, not enough facetime. I have written about the shortcomings of his partnerings in the past, with his dancers moving around one another without the necessary emotional engagement. Of course the pandemic has only made things worse, as City Ballet still rehearses masks up, practicing social distancing in an art that should be about profound connection. 

And yet here some of Peck’s pairings proved to be the highlights of the performance. In the episode “Two Birds,” Copland’s birdsong was given new life in the quick flutterings of Miriam Miller and Russell Janzen on the afternoon I attended. The two returned in “The Split.” Likewise for the partnering of Alexa Maxwell and Jovani Furlan, who shined once the company’s overly busy stage commotion moved on.

It should be said that no ballet should have twenty-two episodes and expect us to keep track of them all, especially in a darkened auditorium, and especially with titles like “Alone Together” (Parts 1 through 3). Whatever happened to the simplicity of “Emeralds,” “Rubies,” and “Diamonds”? Anchor points such as “Simple Gifts,” danced by the company, give way to the unexpected abstractions of “Shadowboxer,” with the stage lighting suddenly switched to silhouette. 

Do the twenty two episodes of this non-narrative work come off as too episodic? Yes they do. But Copland’s music mostly sustains the riffs—and stays with you long after. Ultimately this is the achievement of Copland Dance Episodes, a work that should now enter the standard NYCB repertoire. The piece reveals how music so rooted in the twentieth century can still send tingles and shocks into the ballet of the twenty-first.