Performance

Notes on Giselle: Angel Corella’s Production for The Philadelphia Ballet

March 21, 2024 - By Mark Franko

The charmingly historical Academy of Music with its gilt and red décor was an ideal frame for The Philadelphia Ballet’s production of Giselle. It is subtitled “a pantomime ballet,” which recalls the nomenclature of the late-eighteenth-century ballet reform movement: action ballet or ballet pantomime. Telling a story through expressive movement and without words is frequently associated with Jean-Georges Noverre’s still very readable Letters on Dancing and Ballets (1760). Today we think of Giselle (1841) as a romantic ballet that is unique in the nineteenth-century repertoire for its well-etched characters evolving through an unusually plausible plot with realistic social class distinctions affecting a love triangle. The use of musical leitmotifs strongly supports the narrative thread. All these...

Virtuosity: I Know It When I See It

February 22, 2024 - By Ariel Osterweis

Excerpt from Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 248 pp., April 2024.

Flung out and dispersed in the Diaspora, one has a sense of being touched by or glimpsed from this door. As if walking down the street someone touches you on the shoulder but when you look around there is no one, yet the air is oddly warm with some live presence. That touch is full of ambivalence; it is partly comforting but mostly discomforting, tortured, burning with angered, unknowable remembrance. More disturbing, it does not confine itself to remembrance; you look around you and present embraces are equally discomforting, present glimpses are equally hostile. Art, perhaps music, perhaps poetry, perhaps stories, perhaps aching constant movement—dance and speed—are the only comforts. Being in the...

Of Foundations and Evolutions: Apollo and Impersonality

January 18, 2024 - By Mark Franko

Not surprisingly, the program for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New York City Ballet will give us an opportunity to look both backwards and forwards. The Fall program is dubbed “The Foundation,” and the coming winter season is to be called “The Evolution.” “The Foundation” has been dedicated almost exclusively to the works of George Balanchine (with one Robbins ballet—Glass Pieces (1983)—thrown in for good measure). Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine founded the company in 1948, though, of course, Balanchine’s choreography got its start earlier in the century, under Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Two of the oldest “foundational works” of the current repertoire—Apollo (Stravinsky 1928) and The Prodigal Son (Prokoviev 1929)—were premiered in the...

Yunchan Lim and the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto

August 2, 2023 - By Kris Hartley

This year we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s birth. It is also one year since Yunchan Lim became the youngest pianist ever to win the gold medal in the sixteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, held once every four years. Lim’s acclaimed performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra under the baton of conductor Marin Alsop, clinched his victory and was by all accounts a rare moment.

Music competitions are not ephemeral events. They impact the broader world of classical music by determining which newcomer artists receive media attention and influencing the level of prestige accorded to their concert appearances and recording deals. Competitions also serve as a barometer for stylistic and interpretive trends, in a similar way as literary, film, or...

Late Style in Balanchine

June 9, 2023 - By Mark Franko

Individual items of a repertory mutate happily in the hands of the individuals who perform them. In Of Late Style, Edward Said described this process as akin to rhetorical inventio, which he discussed in relation to music, where it means “the finding of a theme and developing it contrapuntally so that all its possibilities are articulated, expressed, and elaborated.”[1] Said summed it up in this way: “Invention is therefore a form of creative repetition and reliving.”[2] With the classic repertory of New York City Ballet something similar can and does happen. Choreographic work must not only be recognized, it must also be rediscovered; it must fit within a known pattern but also be restored to life under the changed conditions of the present. In Said’s felicitous phrasing, all repetition must be relived...