All Balanchine V

Each of the composers represented on this program were celebrated by the company with a dedicated festival, affirming Balanchine’s particular fondness for their music. A perennial favorite and the choreographer’s first major work created in America, Serenade shares both the title and the broad emotional terrain of its romantic Tschaikovsky score for strings. Premiering on the opening night of the 1972 Stravinsky Festival, Violin Concerto exemplifies Balanchine’s stylized Black & White leotard approach to the composer’s music, with two landmark pas de deux surrounded by two equally groundbreaking full-cast movements of marked symmetry. And in dramatizing Maurice Ravel’s La Valse, itself a reflection of the rise and eventual decline in popularity of the waltz as a social pastime, Balanchine depicts a woman’s doomed dance with the figure of death.