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| Composer: Tchaikovsky Music: Serenade in C Major for String Orchestra Choreographer: George Balanchine Staged by: Costumes: Lighting: Number of Dancers: Time: Source Page |
| ``Serenade'' was the exiled Balanchine's first ballet in the country he would call home, created not for a professional troupe but for his first students at the School of American Ballet he founded with Lincoln Kirstein in 1934. Its pastel serenity and surprising simplicity are radiant, and its possibilities have led over the decades to a kaleidoscope of interpretations./ Review
None of Balanchine's ballets reveal themselves fully at first glance, and it is a measure of his genius that even in "Serenade," which is now 61 years old and an acknowledged 20th-century classic, the viewer will always find new elements to explore. Atmosphere was paramount at this superbly animated performance. The female ensemble and the principals, responding to Maurice Kaplow's energetic conducting of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings, let loose with wind-swept rapture. Yet those who cared could also spot the accumulation of Balanchine's structural detail behind the dynamics and the passion. The 17 women who open the ballet, bathed in the stunning, ice-blue tones of Mark Stanley's lighting, announce an ensemble work that comes to life, deliberately, with basic classroom positions. Yet, as the dancers whirl on and off stage, sometimes literally reeling into the wings, the choreography's pure-dance character yields to hints of narrative episodes. The most obvious moment occurs when the main ballerina, who has danced a waltz with a partner, falls to the floor and is embraced by another man who is later led away by a female angel of death. Consoled by a mother figure, the ballerina is carried aloft in an elegiac cortege. The ballet has moved from dawn to twilight. Yet the true drama of "Serenade" is in the dancing. The ballet has the love-thwarted-by-fate theme of Balanchine's later neo-Romantic works, but its thrust derives less from occasional pictorial images than from the pure-dance patterns that both introduce new motifs and repeat with significant variations. No design is fixed. Everything is in flux. Looking at this grandly charged performance led by Darci Kistler, Nichol Hlinka and Helene Alexopoulos, one could make out fleeting moments that foreshadow major passages in the ballet./ NY Review |
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