The door into the world of this classic ballet is opened by a magically simple stratagem: seventeen female dancers in light blue, three-quarters long tutus à la “Sylphides”, motionless and absorbed in themselves, unanimously take up the First Position of the classical ballet school. The magic and the beauty of pure dance unfold with inexhaustible wealth of invention and with a clear language of movement free of all superficial trappings, which speaks of a dreamy romantic longing in its wistful glory. What was originally conceived as a sort of exercise turned into George Balanchine’s first American masterpiece through his bold grasp at the vocabulary of the danse d’école, an unusually formal structure with formations of dancers in perpetual alternations of round and square and V-shaped and irregularly grouped figures with flexible borders between solo dance and corps de ballet: such is Balanchine’s “Serenade” to the eponymous composition of Peter I. Tchaikovsky for string orchestra, created for his pupils and presented to the public in 1935 at the first performance of the newly founded American Ballet in New York.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1902, died in 1983 in New York, George Balanchine is reckoned among the most significant choreographers of the 20th century. Still today it remains for any company a great distinction and challenge to be able to present a ballet out of his output of 425 works. Rooted as he was in the dance world of his Czarist mother city and forged by the aesthetics of Mario Petipa, for Balanchine the past harmoniously became the springboard for the future. In Paris in the 1920s he fell in with Sergei Diaghilev’s famous Ballets Russes and thereby with the avant-garde. In the USA he found ideal conditions for work from 1934 onwards, not least through the farsighted support of the art-loving industrial magnate Lincoln Kirstein. Balanchine made America into a new home of classical ballet. With his numerous choreographies, including masterpieces such as “Serenade”, “Concerto barocco” and “Agon”, his rethink of classically academic dance for the 20th century enjoyed a success second to none.



 
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MUSIC
Serenade for Strings in C major, op. 48 by Peter I. Tchaikovsky
 

Choreographie George Balanchine
Musikalische Leitung Axel Kober / Ralf Lange
Kostüme  Karinska
Choreographische Einstudierung Nanette Glushak
 
Tänzerinnen Ann-Kathrin Adam,Louisa Rachedi,Anna Tsybina,Doris Becker,Mariana Dias,Ana Djordjevic,Ainara García Navarro,Sachika Abe,Camille Andriot,Feline van Dijken,Géraldine Dunkel,Carolina Francisco Sorg,Cristina Garcia Fonseca,Carrie Johnson,So-Yeon Kim,Emi Kuzuoka,Nicole Morel,Kerry-Anne O'Brien,Daniela Svoboda,Julie Thirault
Tänzer Michal Matys,Ordep Rodriguez Chacon,Christian Bloßfeld,Florent Cheymol,Bruno Narnhammer,Martin Schirbel
 

The world is black and white. The circling movement of the music draws one deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of trances which only seem to be at peace. A messenger of death wanders around alone. Two female dancers are swallowed up by black waterfalls of waving silk in a manner which is both weird and beautiful. “Signing off” is a melancholy piece about parting, an expressive, virtuoso but also lyrically tender dance against the end.

The British/Spanish pair of choreographers Paul Lightfoot and Sol León – two artists of entirely diverse character whose every collaboration becomes a vibrant dialogue – are among the most successful teams of the contemporary dance scene. After training at the Royal Ballet School in London and the Madrid Ballet Academy respectively, the two choreographers found their artistic home in the Nederlands Dans Theater of the Hague, where they not only appeared in numerous ballets by Jiří Kylián, Hans van Manen, Mats Ek, Nacho Duato und Ohad Naharin, but have also created more than thirty works together from 1991 onwards. As from 2002/03 they were “choreographers in residence” of the NDT, and Paul Lightfoot also shared the post of Artistic Advisor to the company with Jiří Kylián. With their ballet “Signing off”. created in 2003 for the NDT to two movements from the violin concerto of the American minimalist Philip Glass (born 1937), Paul Lightfoot and Sol León won the renowned Prix Benois de la Danse of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre in 2004.

The lady violinists Natasha Korsakova and Tai Murray will be alternating in presenting the solo part. FAZ (the Frankfurter Allgemeine) wrote about the young Russian/Greek Gavrilov pupil Natasha Korsakova: “They do exist now and then in concertgoing life, the sidereal hours when one can hardly believe one’s ears”. Tai Murray, long since guest of all the big American orchestras and a member of the BBC New Generation Artist Programme until 2010, is among the rising stars of the American musical scene.
 
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MUSIC
1st and 2nd movements of the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra by Philip Glass
 

Choreographie Paul Lightfoot, Sol León
Musikalische Leitung Axel Kober / Ralf Lange
Bühne Paul Lightfoot, Sol León
Kostüme Paul Lightfoot, Sol León
Licht Tom Bevoort
Choreographische Einstudierung Anders Hellström, Shirley Esseboom
 
Violinsolistin Natasha Korsakova / Tai Murray
Tänzerinnen Marlúcia do Amaral,Yuko Kato
Tänzer Armen Hakobyan,Sonny Locsin,Bogdan Nicula,Remus Sucheana
 

“That defiant song with which he (Luther) and his companions entered Worms was a battle hymn” wrote Heinrich Heine about the church chorale “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott”, written in 1529 and long since become something of an identification symbol for Protestants. He continued: “The old cathedral shook at these new sounds and the ravens felt alarm in their tower nests. That hymn, for the Reformation the equivalent of the Marseillaise, has kept its power to arouse enthusiasm into our time” – power which Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy must have sensed when in January 1831 he reported from Rome to his friend Klingemann after extensive reading of Luther’s hymn texts: “It is more than magnificent how every word cries out for music, how every verse is a new piece, how everywhere progress, movement and growth take place”. By that time he had already completed his “Reformation Symphony”, that “spiritual concert” in which the purity and abstracted beauty so typical of Mendelssohn seems cleft in unusually brusque ruggedness – as if the young composer had wanted to confront the contradictions of his time with each other in a world of thought and sound all of his own, which points beyond absolute music values to the basic quandaries of humanity.

Doubting Man, tossed to and fro between self-assertment and defencelessness, striving after love and recognition, is a central theme in Martin Schläpfer’s choreographic work also. In his ballet “Reformation Symphony” the ensemble repeatedly forms up as if to battle. Their bodies are tensed as hard as steel, and with dangerous aggression the black pointe shoes of the ballerinas are stabbed at a floor which is also stamped with wild, earthy vigour. And yet the world of this piece knows its airy heights also in the long legs of the dancers en pointe, the men’s extreme elevation, freed from all terrestrial gravity, in the vulnerable longing and utter fragility of many passages, or in the entrancingly weightless beauty of the andante, in which each of the seven pairs dances its own pas de deux and nevertheless all merge into the flow of the music.

“Reformation Symphony” is more than just a ballet. It is an urgent questioning of dance per se, of movement and more, of that which is beyond it.
 
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MUSIC
Symphony No.5 in D minor, op.107, “Reformation Symphony” by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
 

Choreographie Martin Schläpfer
Musikalische Leitung Axel Kober / Ralf Lange
Kostüme Marie-Thérèse Jossen
Licht Franz-Xaver Schaffer
 
Tänzerinnen Sachika Abe,Marlúcia do Amaral,Camille Andriot,Géraldine Dunkel,Carolina Francisco Sorg,Ainara García Navarro,Yuko Kato,Nicole Morel,Julie Thirault / Daniela Svoboda
Tänzer Helge Freiberg,Callum Hastie,Antoine Jully,Bogdan Nicula,Ordep Rodriguez Chacon,Remus Sucheana,Pontus Sundset,Maksat Sydykov,Jörg Weinöhl / Martin Schirbel