Masters at Work I

Choreographic invention & magnificent music

Two unusually expansive and complex dances from the company’s founding choreographers showcase their complementary talents for revealing the intricacies of music through dance. Jerome Robbins embraced one of the most imposing challenges of his career in The Goldberg Variations, in which he created a marvelously varied, entrancing suite of dances—solos, pas de deux, and ensembles—to Bach’s monumental composition of the title, comprising 30 variations, remarkably almost all in the same key. For his Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3, Balanchine returned to a favorite composer to craft a lush ballet of great delicacy and variety, composed of four movements culminating in the grandeur of Theme and Variations, choreographed some decades before and here becoming a glittering capstone to the larger work.