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Balanchine Masterworks
Serenade
Composer: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Choreographer: George Balanchine
Staged By: Elyse Borne
Costume Design: after Karinska
Original Lighting Design: Ronald Bates
World Premiere: World Premiere: March 1, 1935—American Ballet Adelphi Theater; New York, New York
San Francisco Ballet Premiere: April 18, 1952 War Memorial Opera House; San Francisco, California
Stravinsky Violin Concerto
Composer: Igor Stravinsky
Choreographer: George Balanchine
Staged By: Bart Cook and Maria Calegari
Lighting Design: Lisa J. Pinkham after Ronald Bates
World Premiere: June 18, 1972—New York City Ballet Stravinsky Festival, New York State Theater; Lincoln Center, New York, New York
San Francisco Ballet Premiere: March 28, 1995 War Memorial Opera House; San Francisco, California
Theme and Variations
Composer: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Choreographer: George Balanchine
Staged By: Elyse Borne
Costume Design: Nicola Benois
Lighting Design: David K.H. Elliott
World Premiere: November 26, 1947—Ballet Theatre City Center Theater, New York, New York
San Francisco Ballet Premiere: August 19, 1986 Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, Illinois
Serenade
George Balanchine’s Serenade is as close to a spiritual experience as anyone could hope to find among this master’s ballets. Created on students during an evening class on stage technique at the School of American Ballet (SAB), it has become one of the most loved and frequently performed of Balanchine’s works. From the moment the curtain rises on that iconic image of 17 women, standing still and serene, to the last glimpse of their pointe shoes as the curtain falls, Serenade takes gentle hold of its audiences’ emotions.
With a body of work that includes more than 200 ballets, Balanchine, the co-founder and artistic director of New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, was one of the most prolific choreographers in dance history. But perhaps more notable were his astounding stylistic range and the enduring quality of his works. Serenade, set to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, was the first ballet that Balanchine created in the United States, and 76 years later it has proved to have unwavering staying power. “It’s timeless, so exquisite,” says San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson.
Danced by the SAB students, Serenade premiered at the estate of Felix M. Warburg in White Plains, New York, on June 9, 1934; it made its professional premiere the following year, danced by the American Ballet (a predecessor to New York City Ballet). Serenade entered SF Ballet’s repertory in 1952 and has reappeared at intervals throughout the Company’s history, most recently in 2004. On this Repertory Season’s all-Balanchine program, its softness and romanticism complement the neoclassical Stravinsky Violin Concerto and the exuberant classicism of Theme and Variations.
As Balanchine relates in his Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, he created Serenade as a way to demonstrate to his students that performing is a far more complex process than taking class. The night he began on it there were seventeen students; the next night nine; the third six. In each class he worked with whoever was there, adding men when some showed up later and including mishaps, like a late entrance and a fall. Serenade is a prime example of Balanchine’s often quoted philosophy: “Use what you’ve got.” He did, to great effect.
Along with its steps, movement quality, and emotional expressiveness, Serenade shows off Balanchine’s ability to elevate the simple act of creating patterns onstage to an art; the beauty of its formations make it an excellent ballet to watch from above. “It’s like an ebb and flow—there’s confusion and then instantly there’s order,” says Elyse Borne, repetiteur for the Balanchine Trust who staged the work. Making those patterns work seamlessly requires a heightened sense of bonding, especially among the corps women.
Despite being created on students, Serenade is far from easy to dance. “It’s allowed to be done by schools because he made it for the [School of American Ballet],” says Borne. “And yet the dancing is so hard. I think it was a lot for him to demand from students—it’s not only hard technically but artistically. Although there’s no story, there’s a lot of romance, a lot of drama, a lot of emotion and passion. If the dancers just do the steps, it doesn’t look like Serenade.” Over time, the ballet continued to evolve, eventually using Tchaikovsky’s full score and becoming more fitted to the skills of the professionals who danced it.
One of the ballet’s most touching moments occurs when the 17 women, standing with their feet together in parallel, open them softly to a small V: first position. It is so elemental, so reflective of this ballet’s origins as a piece for students. Those quiet moments of sheer beauty make Serenade timeless. “No one ever gets tired of it—not dancing it, not seeing it, not staging it,” says Borne. “The curtain goes up and you hear that beautiful music and see the light, and it’s transcendent.”
Stravinsky Violin Concerto
With the first attack of violin bow against strings, Stravinsky Violin Concerto commands attention. Though its lineage lies in the stripped-down costumes of the black-and-white ballets (Agon, The Four Temperaments, Symphony in Three Movements), Stravinsky Violin Concerto marked a step into profoundly creative terrain for George Balanchine. Created in 1972 for New York City Ballet’s Stravinsky Festival, it investigates neoclassical movement and Georgian folk dance to create a medley of exuberance and melancholy.
Balanchine occasionally revisited a beloved score, and such was the case with Igor Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major, which he used for the very short-lived Balustrade, choreographed in 1941 for the Original Ballet Russe. Stravinsky wrote the concerto in 1931, working with virtuoso violinist Samuel Dushkin, who had commissioned it. Never a critical success during Stravinsky’s lifetime, the concerto no doubt gained popularity through its exposure as a ballet score. Its wide-ranging moods, which Balanchine develops so fully in Stravinsky Violin Concerto, share a unifying element: an electrifying chord, always the same, that starts each musical movement.
According to Balanchine biographer Bernard Taper, the choreographer hesitated to name favorites among his ballets and described Stravinsky Violin Concerto simply as “well made.” More effusive in his assessment is Balanchine Trust repetiteur (and former NYCB dancer) Bart Cook, who calls it “spectacular.” Making it even more impressive is the fact that Balanchine created it so quickly. “It came out of that first Stravinsky Festival; it was a real creative renaissance for Balanchine,” says Cook, who danced the role created for Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux and has staged the ballet a dozen or more times. “It was on the schedule one day and then the next day he said, ‘Let’s look at those pas de deux I made yesterday.’ And up got those four principals [Karin von Aroldingen, Bonnefoux, Kay Mazzo, Peter Martins], and we were blown away. He did that in maybe an hour and a half, two hours each—something amazing.”
Cook describes Stravinsky Violin Concerto as “a precursor to a whole new arena of choreography. You need ballet technique to do all these weird things, but they’re way off. And then with the ethnicity on top of it, it’s really wonderfully layered.” In Tbilisi (Balanchine’s hometown) to stage some ballets for the State Ballet of Georgia, Cook saw ethnic dancing that revealed the origins of many of the steps in this and other Balanchine ballets. “There were all of these movements that Mr. Balanchine had in his brain from watching or doing them himself [as a young dancer] in Russia—all of this style, and the girls floating up over the bourrées [fast, tiny steps, usually on pointe]. It was really illuminating and wonderful.”
At the heart of this ballet are two arias, nestled within a brilliant, ever-changing structure in which Balanchine leaves no choreographic grouping unexplored. In these adagios, the choreographer deftly etches an equation between woman and violin, muse and instrument. Cook describes moments in the second pas de deux when the man is “holding [the woman] as a fiddler would hold a violin—and if he’s not, it isn’t correct.” The arias—daring, evocative, and what Cook calls “very special Balanchine”—are the pinnacle of this unparalleled ballet. “They’re different than anything else he’s done,” says Cook, adding that even though they are abstract, “they’re perhaps the most emotional of his ballets, other than that pas de deux he made for Suzanne [Farrell] with the kiss in it, Meditation.”
Balanchine is revered as much for his craftsmanship as for his artistry, and in Stravinsky Violin Concerto he proves how intertwined they are. “He used to say, ‘There are only so many words in the vocabulary. It’s how you arrange them that makes a poem,’ ” says Cook. “He was making new words all the time, expanding the language. I think this is exceptional Balanchine.”
Theme and Variations
George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations is a classical ballet in miniature, complete with tutus, tiaras, variations, and a pas de deux. Through both choreography and atmosphere it reads as a dazzling tribute to Imperial Russia, whether presented in its traditional setting of a ballroom with pillars, drapes, and chandeliers or simply against a colorful background. And it has a reputation as having two of the most exposed (technique-wise), formidable principal roles in Balanchine’s repertory. It’s pure dance, without the sometimes masking effects of a story, characterizations, or moments of preparation that are built into a full-length classical ballet. As San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson says, “You make a mistake or something goes wrong, and everybody in the theater will know. Yet it’s very fulfilling to dance.”
When Balanchine created Theme and Variations, in 1947, it was for American Ballet Theatre, not his own New York City Ballet. A huge critical success, the ballet helped cement his reputation in the United States (though he had been working in this country for 15 years by then). Alicia Alonso and Igor Youskevitch danced the principal roles at the premiere, followed by an impressive roster of dancers that includes Gelsey Kirkland, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Cynthia Harvey, and Kevin McKenzie (now ABT’s artistic director). Thirteen years later, in 1960, it made its New York City Ballet premiere, where Tomasson was among the principal dancers who performed it. He recalls dancing it with Kirkland on the company’s tour of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and in New York, as well as with Patricia McBride. Balanchine probably made changes in the ballet once it arrived at NYCB; according to repetiteur Elyse Borne, that company’s production differs slightly from ABT’s.
For the score, Balanchine chose the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3 for Orchestra, written in 1884, which consists of an opening theme followed by twelve variations. (Balanchine often named his ballets after their music’s title or structure.) In 1970, twenty-three years after creating Theme and Variations, Balanchine revisited the score, this time choreographing the entire four-movement piece and using Theme as the final movement. Calling his new work Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3, he made only minimal changes in integrating the Theme portion into the larger ballet. (The first three movements of Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3 have a far more romantic tone than the sparkling finale; the women wear flowing dresses with their hair down, and some of them even dance barefoot.)
In Theme and Variations, Balanchine whips his dancers through his notoriously fast footwork, virtuosic solos, pas de deux, and ensemble dances, all demanding pristine technique. But another aspect of the ballet’s difficulty is the pacing: “It’s all about stamina,” says Borne. “This is just ‘Go!’ ” she says, comparing it to the more leisurely pace of a full-length ballet. “And those solos for the girl are so fast. She goes from the second one right into the pas de deux, and they go from the pas de deux right into the finale.” Borne does her best Balanchine imitation: “You don’t need a rest step. No need; you can rest later. When you’re retired you can rest.”
SF Ballet has had Theme and Variations in its repertory since 1986, and an excerpt was seen most recently at former Principal Dancer Tina LeBlanc’s retirement performance last spring. Tomasson likes to keep it active because the dancers need ballets that challenge them on this level in order to hone their technique. “That’s very, very necessary,” the artistic director says. “Choreographically there are things you just have to do; there’s no way around it. It’s like [Balanchine’s] Symphony in C—the more they dance that, the stronger they get and the more they hold their technique.” It’s not enough to work on technique in class, he says; dancers need to face those demands onstage. “I feel you have to come back to center, back to the core of what you trained for.” That means classicism—pure, clean, and exhilarating.
Program notes by Cheryl Ossola