TCHAIKOVSKY WITH BALANCHINE
INEZ AND VINDOODH include Balanchine’ s A Midsummer Night’ s Dream, Coppelia, Orpheus, Symphony in C, Jewels, Who Cares?, Stars and Stripes, The Nutcracker, The Four Temperaments and Mozartiana; Jerome Robbins’ The Concert and Antique Epigraphs; and Peter Martins’ The Sleeping Beauty. A principal and soloist with numerous nationally acclaimed companies, her film and television credits include George Balanchine’ s The Nutcracker ®( Time- Warner), PBS’ Great Performances: Dinner With Balanchine, Balanchine: Dance in America( Serenade and Western Symphony), Peter Martins’ Concerto for Two Solo Pianos and Live from Lincoln Center: A Midsummer Night’ s Dream.
Wingert is one of a small group of artists selected by The George Balanchine Trust to set his choreography. In this capacity she has traveled throughout the U. S., setting and staging the Balanchine repertoire for Butler University, Indiana University, Baltimore School for the Arts, Joffrey Ballet Chicago and Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, to name a few.
Wingert is head faculty at Manhattan Youth Ballet and is on faulty at the Ailey School, Professional Division. She has been a guest instructor for Princeton University and Harvard University, UCSB, Interlochen, Jessica Lang Dance, Kyle Abraham: AIM, Sarasota Ballet, BalletMet and New York City Public Library.
Heather Watts
Heather Watts joined New York City Ballet( NYCB) in 1970 and was one of the last of the famed Balanchine ballerinas. Watts worked closely with George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins at NYCB, retiring from the stage in 1995. She has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 1995, has created academic courses on Balanchine’ s life and work at Harvard University, was a visiting lecturer in dance at Princeton University and has led residencies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Watts was a fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU in 2014 and is currently an affiliate fellow there. She has received numerous awards, including a Doctorate honoris causa from Hunter College.
About the Concert
ROMEO AND JULIET FANTASY- OVERTURE
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born in Votkinsk, Russia, May 7, 1840; died in St. Petersburg, Russia, November 6, 1893
Though it is now more than 400 years old, Shakespeare’ s Romeo and Juliet still reigns as the most compelling of all love stories. And it holds as much allure for composers as for movie directors. In 1869, the 28-year-old Tchaikovsky was just recovering from breaking off his only romance with a woman— the fascinating Belgian opera singer Desirée Artôt— when he was urged to use this subject to transform his pain into art by fellow Russian composer, Mily Balakirev.
A member of the five Russian nationalist composers known as the“ Mighty Handful,” Balakirev became more famous for the compositions he inspired in others than for his own works, and the young Tchaikovsky was one of his protégés. On a long walk together, he suggested Romeo and Juliet as the perfect program for a symphonic poem and followed that up with a letter detailing how the work should be laid out. Tchaikovsky latched onto the idea immediately, but used his own artistic discretion about Balakirev’ s suggestions. The first version of his“ Fantasy-Overture” was written in just six weeks at the end of 1869. But when he heard it performed in Moscow in March 1870, Tchaikovsky decided it needed considerably more work. In revisions made soon after, he added the brooding opening that so perfectly establishes a mood of tender pathos, and before publishing it in 1880, he devised the startling conclusion, confirming the tragic denouement with eight searing B-major chords.
The musical events of Tchaikovsky’ s first masterpiece are so well known they need little explanation; they convey virtually all the dramatic elements of Shakespeare’ s play except the scenes of comic relief. Some commentators have linked the dark, chant-like theme that opens the work with the character of Friar Laurence who marries the young lovers. This theme plays an important role in the middle development section— striving in the horns against the jagged principal theme representing the battles between the Capulets and Montagues, just as in the play Laurence tries in vain to bring the families together. Notice how craftily Tchaikovsky introduces his famous love theme, one of the most inspired this great melodist ever wrote. He first presents it with very subdued scoring— an English horn solo over violas— saving its full passion for later when it returns soaring aloft in the violins.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion harp and strings.
SUITE FROM SWAN LAKE
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
If only Tchaikovsky had lived another year and a half, he would have seen his first ballet, Swan Lake, in a production worthy of the masterpiece it is and witnessed the beginning of its enduring popularity as perhaps the greatest of all story ballets. For on January 27, 1895— just over a year after the composer’ s death— St. Petersburg’ s Maryinsky Theatre premiered a triumphant production, with choreography by the greatest ballet master of the age, Marius Petipa.
The situation was hardly so auspicious when Swan Lake received its world premiere at Moscow’ s Bolshoi Theatre on March 4, 1877. The set design was poor, the choreography uninspired and the orchestral playing so sloppy that few of the critics present even noticed how good Tchaikovsky’ s music was. And, moreover, with this score and the tragic storyline it expressed, Tchaikovsky was attempting something revolutionary for Russian ballet in that period. 19 th-century Russian audiences liked their ballets to be decorative and entertaining, with light and diverting music and just enough plot to link the
36 OVERTURE / BSOmusic. org