MASTERS AT WORK
SEPT 17, 18, 20, 21 mat, 26, 2024
Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2
Music Peter Ilyitch Tschaikovsky Choreography George Balanchine
Duo Concertant Music Igor Stravinsky Choreography George Balanchine
Glass Pieces Music Philip Glass Choreography Jerome Robbins
APR 26, 27 MAT & EVE, 28, MAY 1, 12
David H. Koch Theater
TWO CELEBRATED WORKS EVINCE THE PERFECTLY COMPLEMENTING STYLES OF NYCB’S FOUNDING CHOREOGRAPHERS
Ever since its 1969 premiere, Jerome Robbins’ expansive masterwork Dances at a Gathering has held a special place in the repertory. Set to a suite of Chopin’s piano works, the ballet, performed on a bare stage, is a pure dance depiction of the romantic, comic, and communal interactions between the performers onstage, who, while not specifically characterized, express aspects of their personalities and spirituality through classical steps occasionally inflected with folk influences. The ballet is joined by another deeply romantic work: Balanchine’s Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet is, as the title suggests, a four-movement ballet that vividly evokes the elegance of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with Schoenberg’s orchestrations of Brahms’s music adding a subtle veneer of modernity.
BALLETS ON THIS PROGRAM
DANCES AT A GATHERING
Choreography Jerome Robbins
The quintessential piano ballet, Dances at a Gathering distills the spectrum of human interaction into the most natural of movements, a landmark for its invention, virtuosity, and constantly shifting emotions.
Dances at a Gathering, which premiered in 1969, heralded Jerome Robbins’ return to New York City Ballet after a 13-year absence. Inspired by Chopin’s piano music, Robbins quickly began choreographing in the rehearsal studio. When he showed 25 minutes of choreography to Balanchine, he said, “Make more, make it like popcorn,” pretending to pop popcorn into his mouth. The work eventually expanded to an hour in length with a cast of ten dancers. Chopin’s mazurkas, waltzes, and études, groundbreaking at the time of their composition, are rooted in the Slavic character of his Polish homeland, yet still convey the elegance of Paris, where they were created. Robbins ultimately used 18 of Chopin’s piano pieces, creating dances for various duets, solos, and larger groupings. “The ballet stays and exists in the time of the music and its work,” wrote Robbins. “Nothing is out of it, I believe; all gestures and moods, steps, etc. are part of the fabric of the music’s time and its meaning to me.”
BRAHMS-SCHOENBERG QUARTET
Choreography George Balanchine
A sweeping romantic work for 55 dancers, the Austro-Hungarian-inflected Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet ends in an intoxicating finale.
Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25 (1861) marked a new development in chamber music. Though it received mixed reviews at the time of its premiere, it proved to be deeply influential for a number of 20th-century composers, laying the groundwork for atonality. Among the work’s admirers was Brahms’ great Viennese successor, Arnold Schoenberg, who in 1937 arranged the quartet for orchestra. In a letter to Dr. Alfred Frankenstein, the distinguished critic and musicologist of the San Francisco Chronicle, Schoenberg gives his reasons for this somewhat surprising undertaking: “1. I love the piece. 2. It is seldom played. 3. It is always very badly played, as the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and one hears nothing of the strings. I wanted for once to hear everything, and this I have achieved.” Balanchine often visited Stravinsky in Hollywood, and the composer would make suggestions of unfamiliar scores that might be suitable for ballet. In 1957, he played Balanchine a version of the Gounod Symphony, which the choreographer set the following year. In 1964, similarly, came the suggestion of Schoenberg’s orchestration of Brahms’ quartet, and Balanchine premiered the ballet in 1966, two years after NYCB’s move from City Center to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.
CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS
Choreography Christopher Wheeldon
BALANCHINE + WHEELDON
MARCH 1, 2024 AT 8:00 PM David H. Koch Theater
With delightful narration written by John Lithgow, Carnival of the Animals imagines a schoolboy’s night in the Museum of Natural History and the outlandish museum residents who come to life as versions of his teachers, classmates, and family members.
Created for New York City Ballet in 2003, Christopher Wheeldon’s Carnival of the Animals is set to Camille Saint-Saëns' humorous musical suite of 14 movements that the composer created for a private performance in 1886. Wheeldon’s ballet features a cast of nearly 50 dancers and tells the story of a young boy, Oliver Pendleton Percy the Third, who falls asleep in New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and dreams that the people in his life — family members, teachers, classmates — have all been transformed into animals. The production features a text written by the award-winning actor John Lithgow, who performed the narration in the original NYCB production. For the 2013 revival of Carnival of the Animals, the narration was performed by the stage and screen actor Jack Noseworthy.
INNOVATORS & ICONS
FEB 15, 23, 24 MAT, 25, 27, 28
DIVE INTO WORKS FROM CHOREOGRAPHERS PAST AND PRESENT
A world premiere ballet by Alexei Ratmansky, who joins the Company as artist in residence this season, forms the centerpiece of this program. Jerome Robbins’s Opus 19/The Dreamer casts an elusive spell with its imagery of a nocturnal journey into the mysteries of the mind, with a muse-like figure haunting the imagination of the dreamer of the title. The program concludes with Balanchine’s iconic leotard ballet Symphony in Three Movements, a dance alive with electric energy.
ALL BALANCHINE
Concerto Barocco
Kammermusik