This week, Ballet West’s new production will give the trinity of art, dance and music a resplendent tribute fit for an empress. It will feature Utah premieres of works by two of the best-known international choreographers and a reprise of a Balanchine masterpiece that was the choreographer’s first work he set in America 90 years ago.
With a run scheduled Nov. 8-16, Pictures at an Exhibition will present a trio of ballets that are the epitome of artistic beauty: George Balanchine’s Serenade, Alexei Ratmansky’s suite of dances set to Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Tony-Award winning choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour, set to a score with music by Ezio Bosso and Vivaldi.
Pictures at an Exhibition opens just six days after Ballet West launched its 61st season with a blockbuster production of Val Caniparoli’s evening-length Jekyll & Hyde. While the triple bill of ballet repertory signifies the purest artistic expressions of beauty, Adam Sklute, the company’s artistic director, in an interview with The Utah Review, said it represents one of the most technically demanding programs of the season. The production also will feature the Ballet West Orchestra, led by Jared Oaks.
Jekyll & Hyde’s story plumbed the classic Robert Louis Stevenson novella by connecting it to relevant contemporary social themes, which is one of art’s most compelling purposes and functions. Pictures goes to the elemental core of art for humanity. Explaining how he conceived the Pictures theme, Sklute said, ”it definitely takes into account the idea about art as a great unifier of humanity during a time when so many things are so divisive.” He added, “art brings together shared experiences and emotions through the glory of music and movement that transcends ideological beliefs.” Principal Artist Emily Adams, who has danced with the company for 18 years, said in a statement released by Ballet West, “We’re really lucky to be putting on this triple-bill. I think it’s one of the best triple-bills that Ballet West has performed since I have danced here.”
Premiered in 2014 by the New York City Ballet, Ratmansky’s Pictures is set for 10 dancers to the original piano score for the music and features projections of Wassily Kandinsky’s Color Study Squares with Concentric Circles. Ratmansky explained his creative process: “When I started to work on this music, there were stories and characters, preset,” he said in a video created by Wiener Staatsballett in 2021. “For example, the second musical number is the ‘gnome,’ which is a very angry little magical creature that does bad things. So casting a beautiful prima ballerina [in that role], there is an irony to it. But she has to find her ‘inner gnome,’ so to speak, and release this negative energy, or imagine this negative energy. That’s interesting to see, when the dancers are pushed out of their comfort zone.”
Ever since Sklute saw a performance of the Ratmansky piece a year after it premiered, he said that he was committed to giving it an Utah premiere on the Ballet West stage. Sklute had hoped that it would occur sooner but when the pandemic upset scheduling intentions, he knew that it would take up to several years to reshuffle the cards. “For the cast, from top to bottom, it is an incredibly demanding and difficult piece but with the delay, I also knew that our dancers would be fully prepared to manage the artistic expectations when it was time,” he explained. To wit: Ratmansky, an artist-in-residence at the New York City Ballet, has been working this week with the ten Ballet West dancers who will perform Pictures. “This is an honor he rarely bestows on the many companies that perform his pieces,” Sklute said.
The accompanying music will feature a live performance of the original piano score, which Mussorgsky composed in 1874 in memory of his friend, the Russian painter and architect Viktor Hartmann. It was Vladimir Stasov, a Russian critic, who organized the exhibition of Hartmann’s artworks and who solidified the popular imagery associated with the music. An illuminating description of the music is found in the words of Alexandra Orlova, who explained that Pictures “is far from being a simple ‘illustration’ of Hartmann’s drawings. It is a profoundly philosophical work, a meditation on life and death, on history, on the people, and on man in general.” Thus, the musical canvas in Pictures opens up a wide ranging spectrum of expressive and interpretive possibilities, which Ratmansky has achieved brilliantly in his balletic rendering.
Premiered by the San Francisco Ballet in 2008. Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour features music by Vivaldi and Ezio Bosso. It is a natural companion to Pictures, as Wheeldon sets seven scenes like miniature choreographic paintings. In an earlier published interview with Cheryl Ossola, Wheeldon described several scenes: “There’s one part that sounds really Celtic; we call it the ‘Hebrides pas de deux’… It feels like two people in a big, barren, beautiful, poetic place, and they’re alone and there’s nothing around except for a little white cottage in the distance and a couple of moo-cows.” Regarding a waltz duet, Wheeldon said, “I think of a Fellini-esque scene with the couple dancing around the Trevi Fountain, and she’s in a purple polka-dot dress with heels and a big ’do’.” Sklute said that ever since he saw Within The Golden Hour on stage in San Francisco, he knew immediately it would be the “right fit” for Ballet West.
The opener will be Balanchine’s Serenade, based on Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, and this performance will celebrate the 90th anniversary of its creation, which was the first work the famous choreographer set in the U.S. A landmark piece, Serenade has the order of the music’s final two movements reversed, so that the dance ends with the Elegy, instead of the light-hearted Russian dance.
“Balanchine created a story literally out of nothing and he made do with what he had at the time,” Sklute explained. He added that one example of his genius came when 17 dancers showed up on the first day of rehearsal and in order to capture a strong symmetrical design, he set two perfectly overlapping diamond patterns on them.
Sklute selected Serenade as the opener, acknowledging that Ratmansky and Wheeldon were deeply influenced by Balanchine as they set out to create their own movement language. “It is the perfect beginning for the gallery stroll of ballet that the audience will experience so they can connect all three pieces in this program,” Sklute added. Serenade also was on the first program Ballet West performed when the company moved to the Capitol Theatre in downtown Salt Lake City in 1979.
For tickets and more information, see the Ballet West website.