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BOSTON BALLET RETURNS HOME FROM CRITICALLY
ACCLAIMED TOUR OF SPAIN WITH EXCITING LINE-UP OF BALLET
FAVORITES
HIGHLIGHTS OF FALL SEASON INCLUDE
EXCLUSIVE GALA EVENT PLUS PERFORMANCES OF TWO BALANCHINE FAVORITES,
LA SYLPHIDE AND THE COMPANY’S WORLD-RENOWNED PRODUCTION OF
THE NUTCRACKER
BOSTON, MA – August 13, 2007
Following a critically acclaimed six-week tour to Spain that
launched the 2007-2008 season, Boston Ballet returns home to begin
rehearsals for the fall season, which includes three programs that
encompass more than 170 years of ballet and showcase the
versatility of the dancers.
The Company inaugurates its Fall season on
Friday, October 12 with Night of Stars: A Boston Ballet Gala
Performance. Like last year’s gala performance, the first
staged by Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen, this one-night-only
event will feature the entire company and showcase all Boston
Ballet principal dancers and internationally renowned guest artists
in a special program. A week later, the Company will open its
customary six-program schedule with two riveting works by George
Balanchine, Monumentum pro Gesualdo and Movements for Piano and
Orchestra – first danced by Boston Ballet in 2003 –
which share the bill with Sorella Englund’s acclaimed staging
of August Bournonville’s two-act La Sylphide. This definitive
production of Bournonville’s masterpiece is one of two
programs being presented by Boston Ballet in Spain; the other is an
all-Balanchine triple bill featuring Serenade, Who Cares? (concert
version) and The Four Temperaments. Boston Ballet will also
showcase Mikko Nissinen’s magical production of The
Nutcracker in December.
All performances are held at Citi Performing
Arts CenterSM Wang Theatre with the exception of The Nutcracker,
which returns to The Opera House for the third consecutive
year.
Monumentum pro Gesualdo, Movements
for Piano and Orchestra, La Sylphide
October 18-28, 2007
Monumentum pro Gesualdo
Music: Igor Stravinsky
Choreography: George Balanchine
Movements for Piano and
Orchestra
Music: Igor Stravinsky
Choreography: George Balanchine
La Sylphide
Music: Herman Løvenskjold
Choreography: Sorella Englund after August Bournonville
Sets and Costumes: Peter Cazalet
Monumentum Pro Gesualdo, choreographed
by Balanchine for New York City Ballet in 1960, and Movements
for Piano and Orchestra, choreographed in 1963, are two
exquisite miniatures that have been performed together since 1966.
Although both ballets are danced in practice clothes to scores by
Stravinsky, they are musically, choreographically and stylistically
quite different from each other. Stravinsky composed
Monumentum in 1960 in honor of the four-hundredth
anniversary of the birth of the composer Don Carlo Gesualdo (who
may have been born as late as 1566). Gesualdo, a tempestuous and
deeply disturbed nobleman who murdered his first wife and her
lover, is today best remembered for that act, and for writing six
books of madrigals. Stravinsky’s score is made up of three of
Gesualdo’s madrigals for five voices “recomposed for
instruments.” Each piece lasts just over two minutes, and
Balanchine responded to the music with choreography that is courtly
and lyrical; Nissinen calls it “a profound statement of
harmony and balance.”
Movements, composed a year earlier
than Monumentum, is a dissonant work using the 12-tone serial
method. Balanchine’s choreography is as spare and modern as
the music. In the book Balanchine’s Complete Stories of
the Great Ballets, the choreographer wrote, “Stravinsky
has said that my ballet might also have been called ‘Electric
Currents.’ It is, as he says, a double concerto for male and
female solo dancers, both identified with the piano solo. There is
an accompanying corps de ballet of six girls. . . . Nothing gave me
greater pleasure afterwards than Stravinsky’s saying the
performance ‘was like a tour of a building for which I had
drawn the plans but never explored the result.’”
Following the premiere of this nine-minute work, Allen Hughes wrote
in The New York Times that Monumentum “may
well go down in history as one of the greatest ballets [Balanchine]
ever created. Only prudence keeps me from saying outright that I
think it is as nearly perfect a work of dance art as I have ever
seen.”
The 2005 Boston Ballet premiere of Sorella
Englund’s staging of August Bournonville’s La
Sylphide was hailed by Karen Campbell in The Boston Globe as
“beautifully distilled and vividly theatrical.” Englund
was for many years an extraordinary dramatic ballerina with the
Royal Danish Ballet (RDB) and an exceptional interpreter of
Bournonville’s works. Today she is recognized as one of the
foremost ballet coaches in the world, specializing in the
Bournonville style.
La Sylphide, the first great Romantic
ballet, was originally choreographed by Filippo Taglioni in 1832.
Bournonville saw the production in Paris, and in 1836 choreographed
his own version for the RDB, basing it on the same story but
commissioning a new score by Herman Løvenskjold. This
wistful fable takes place on the wedding day of a young man named
James, who becomes enraptured by the vision of a bewitching sylph.
He abandons his fiancée Effie at the altar to pursue the
elusive creature. The ballet’s themes of escape and fantasy
remain as resonant today as they were 170 years ago.
The Nutcracker
November 29-December 29, 2007
Music: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Choreography: Mikko Nissinen
Sets: Helen Pond and Herbert Senn
Costumes: David Walker and Charles Heightchew
Lighting Design: Alexander Nichols
Following the opening of The
Nutcracker last season, Thea Singer wrote in The Boston
Globe, “Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen
has choreographed a version of the E.T.A. Hoffmann story, to the
full Tchaikovsky score, that both springs from the music and revels
in the theatrical legerdemain that feeds kids’
souls.”
This will mark the fortieth consecutive year
that Boston Ballet is performing The Nutcracker. There
will be 36 performances this season, and once again the production
will feature the entire Company, more than 200 children from Boston
Ballet School, and the full Tchaikovsky score performed live by the
Boston Ballet Orchestra. Nissinen has been fine-tuning the
production since it moved to The Opera House in 2005 in order to
use the stage to its best advantage, and changes are in store once
more. The second act will be revamped with a new set that will give
the dancers more room in which to move. “I’m very
pleased with the production the way it is now,” said
Nissinen. “I thought The Nutcracker looked wonderful
this past season, after the various modifications it underwent when
we moved to The Opera House. And now we’re going to have a
set in the second act that will be designed specifically for this
beautiful space.”
Boston Ballet Fall Season at a
Glance:
Night of Stars: A Boston
Ballet Gala Performance
October 12, 2007
Monumentum pro Gesualdo, Movements
for Piano and Orchestra, La Sylphide
October 18-28, 2007
Monumentum pro Gesualdo
Music: Igor Stravinsky
Choreography: George Balanchine
Movements for Piano and
Orchestra
Music: Igor Stravinsky
Choreography: George Balanchine
La Sylphide
Music: Herman Løvenskjold
Choreography: Sorella Englund after August Bournonville
Sets and Costumes: Peter Cazalet
The Nutcracker
November 29-December 29, 2007
Music: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Choreography: Mikko Nissinen
Sets: Helen Pond and Herbert Senn
Costumes: David Walker and Charles Heightchew
Lighting Design: Alexander Nichols
Tickets
Tickets for season ballets can be purchased by
phone through Telecharge at 800.447.7400, online at
www.telecharge.com, or in person at the Citi Performing Arts Center
Wang Theatre box office, located at 270 Tremont Street in Boston's
Theatre District, open Monday- Saturday from 10am - 6pm. Prices for
La Sylphide, Romeo & Juliet, Next Generation, Swan
Lake, and Three Masterpieces range from $25 - 110.
($25 price available in person only) Prices for Night of Stars:
A Gala Benefit Performance range from $50 - $125. Discounted
group tickets (10 or more) are available by calling Boston Ballet's
Group Sales at 617.456.6343. Rush tickets are available. Contact
the Boston Ballet box office at 617.695.6955 or visit
www.bostonballet.org for details.
Tickets for The Nutcracker can be
purchased by phone through Ticketmaster at 617.931.2787, online at
www.ticketmaster.com or www.bostonballet.org, or in person at the
Opera House box office, 539 Washington Street, open Monday -
Saturday from 10am - 6pm. Prices for The Nutcracker start
at $30. Discounted group tickets (20 or more) are available by
calling Boston Ballet's Group Sales at 617.456.6343. Boston Ballet
subscribers and donors should call the Boston Ballet box office at
617.695.6955 for tickets.
About Boston Ballet
Founded in 1963, Boston Ballet is one of the
leading dance companies in North America. Under the leadership of
Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen and Executive Director Valerie
Wilder, the Company has 50 full-time dancers and maintains an
internationally acclaimed repertoire of classical and contemporary
works, ranging from full-length story ballets to new works by some
of today’s best choreographers.
Boston Ballet’s second company, Boston
Ballet II, is made up of pre-professional dancers who gain
experience by performing with Boston Ballet and as an independent
group, presenting lecture-demonstrations and unique programs to
audiences throughout the Northeast. The Boston Ballet Center for
Dance Education reaches and instructs more than 3,000 students of
all ages each year through Boston Ballet School, Young Dancers
Summer Workshop, Summer Dance Program, DanceLab, Citydance,
Adaptive Dance and Taking Steps.
Boston Ballet gratefully
acknowledges the following institutional partners:
State Street Corporation, 2007
Sponsor, The Nutcracker
Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation/Linda S. Waintrup,
Trustee
Massachusetts Cultural Council
National Endowment for the Arts
Boston Organ & Piano, Official Piano Supplier of Boston
Ballet
Delta Airlines, Official Airline of Boston Ballet
WCVB-TV, Channel 5, Television Partner
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