Choreography: George Balanchine
Music: Peter I. Tchaikovsky
Costume Design: Russ Vogler
Allegro Brillante, George Balanchine's classical ballet set to music for
piano and orchestra of Peter I. Tchaikovsky, might be aptly subtitled
"Appassionata."
The music, originally projected by the composer for use in a symphony,
was the last Tchaikovsky composed. It is melodically and stylistically
reminiscent of much of his work, and chares with the best of those a brisk
vigor which motivates the dance. The choreography, like the music,
is Russian and romantic, evidenced throughout in expansiveness of movement
and gesture, in dazzling speed, in the inward cast of a lifted knee, in
the flung out tours jetes. According to Balanchine, Allegro "contains
everything I knew about the classical ballet-in thirteen minutes."
(Nancy Reynolds, ed. Repertory in Review: Forty Years of the New York
City Ballet.) And some of what Balanchine knew by birth, by experience,
was the verve of a Russian vocabulary of dance.
Allegro Brillante is a work for two principals and four couples, and though
it requires of all a technical mastery, the ballerina's Cadenza with piano
is a creation of dazzling possibilities. That role, originally created
by Maria Tallchief, has been danced with dazzling success by numbers of
the NYCB's principal ballerinas including, among others, Diana Adams,
Director of the Kansas City Ballet School.
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