Vienna Opera Tickets

This season the Wiener Staatsoper will host a performance of four ballets from three undisputed masters of the genre.

George Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto was first seen in 1972. Balanchine had used the same music – Igor Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto in D major – for Balustrade, created in 1941. Whereas the earlier work was extravagantly costumed, the design of Stravinsky Violin Concerto is pared back to the minimum. There is no scenery and the dancers wear what they would in rehearsal, allowing the audience to focus on the relationship between the performers and the music.

The same choreographer’s Theme and Variations could not be more different. Premiered in 1947, Balanchine’s invention is a celebratory pageant of the classical age when Russian ballet and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s music reigned supreme. The final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in G major, which contains twelve variations, provides the perfect musical accompaniment for a more orthodox ballet that features a central pas de deux and, to finish, a grand polonaise.

By contrast, John Neumeier’s Bach Suite III, which enjoyed its premiere in 1981, stretches the conventions of classical ballet to the limit. Neumeier inverts the normal relationships between male and female dancers, challenging our understanding of balletic convention. Although Johann Sebastian Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major contains two gavottes and a gigue, it’s doubtful that the composer ever envisaged his music being set to dance. As a result, Neumeier had the opportunity to interpret it however he liked.

The performance concludes with Jerome Robbins’ The Concert (or, The Perils of Everybody) from 1956, a ballet that satirizes the small behavioral quirks of a music-going audience. Played for laughs, Frédéric Chopin’s graceful music is subverted by the antics of the dancers: sometimes, they fuss with umbrellas; at others, they shuffle awkwardly across the dance floor.

As their titles suggest, this inspired compilation of twentieth-century ballets, acknowledges the inseparable relationship between dance and the music that accompanies it.

Programme:

Stravinsky Violin Concerto
Choreography: George Balanchine
Music: Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra, by Igor Stravinsky
Conductor: Simon Hewett

Theme and Variations
Choreography: George Balanchine
Music: Suite No. 3 in G major, Op.55, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky  
Conductor: Simon Hewett
Costumes: Christian Lacroix

Bach Suite III
Choreography and Costumes: John Neumeier
Music: Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068, by Johann Sebastian Bach
Conductor: Simon Hewett

The Concert (or, The Perils of Everybody)
Choreography: Jerome Robbins
Music by Frédéric Chopin:
Polonaise in A Major, No. 1, Op. 40
Berceuse in D Flat Major, Op. 57
Prelude No. 18 in F minor and Prelude No. 16 in B Flat Minor, Op. 28
Waltz for piano in E minor, KK IVa/15
Prelude No. 7 in A major, Op. 28
Mazurka in G major
Prelude in E minor No. 4, Op. 28
Ballade No. 3 in A flat major, Op. 47
Conductor: Simon Hewett
Orchestration: Clare Grundman