an blog | AJBlog Central | Contact me | Advertise
You are here: Home / Archives for George Balanchine

All American

May 11, 2013 by 7 Comments
Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild in Christopher Wheeldon's A Place for Us. Photo: Paul Kolnik

New York City Ballet, Lincoln Center, April 30 through June 9 In the Spring of 1988, the New York City Ballet put on an American Music Festival. George Balanchine had been dead for five years, and the two Ballet Masters in Chief, Peter Martins and Jerome Robbins, commissioned enough new ballets to keep dancers, guest choreographers, and resident choreographers rushing in and out of the company’s studios, gnawing on health bars. Was this Eliot Feld’s rehearsal? No, it was Bart Cook’s. Then when was Martins scheduled? Not too many … [Read more...]

05/11/13 2:38 PM | filed under: ballet |

Fair Winds from the West

February 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Seth Orza as Balanchine's Apollo with (front to back) Carla Körbes, Maria Chapman, and Lesley Rausch. Photo: Lindsay Thomas

Lincoln Kirstein has written that while the New York State Theater (now the Koch) was under construction, George Balanchine wandered in and saw that the pit would hold no more than 35 musicians. He immediately threatened to withdraw the New York City Ballet as the principal designated tenant. The pit was redesigned to accommodate 70 players. Had Balanchine, to whom music was so important, visited City Center during the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s recent season, he would, I’m sure, have been overjoyed to hear the scores for three of his … [Read more...]

02/22/13 11:58 PM | filed under: ballet |

See the Music

January 27, 2013 by 10 Comments
Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, keeping an eye on his creations

George Balanchine once said that during his grueling years as a pupil in the Imperial St. Petersburg Theatrical School, he didn’t fall in love with ballet until he was twelve. The change occurred the first time he appeared onstage in Marius Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty, set to Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky’s ravishing score, and young Georgi Melitonovitch was cast as a Cupid. His arrows, so to speak, boomeranged back, and he was smitten. Tchaikovsky remained Balanchine’s favorite Russian composer (barring Stravinsky, of course), and the … [Read more...]

01/27/13 11:46 AM | filed under: ballet |

Astray in Summer Dreams

June 28, 2012 by 6 Comments
Cory Stearns as Oberon and Xiomra Reyes as Titania in ABT's The Dream. Photo: Gene Schiavone

If you can’t see a production of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a woodland setting during a long June twilight, as I once did, you can be enthralled by a different sort of magic conjured up by the Bard’s plot. George Balanchine’s 1962 ballet of the same name ended its week in the New York City Ballet’s season before American Ballet Theatre hit the solstice dead on with Frederick Ashton’s 1964 The Dream. These are two such beautiful ballets that I wish I could have crossed Lincoln Center Plaza from an NYCB matinee … [Read more...]

06/28/12 6:04 PM | filed under: ballet |

an ArtsJournal blog