Serenade

Balanchine / Tchaikovsky

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The first ballet George Balanchine made in America, in 1934, Serenade is one of his most famous and cherished works. Seventeen girls form and reform in kaleidoscopic patterns. A girl enters, late. A boy joins her. After she falls to the ground, another boy approaches her, guided by a “Dark Angel,” and then leaves her behind, to be carried off to a kind of transfiguration.

Endlessly suggestive though essentially plotless, Serenade is impelled forward by Tchaikovsky’s rushing, deeply affecting score.

Carousel Pas De Deux

MacMillan / Rodgers

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COMPANY PREMIERE
When London’s Royal National Theatre’s revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel moved to Lincoln Center in 1994, it ran for almost a year, winning five Tony Awards, including one for Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography. His deeply touching duet for the central couple is a quintessential expression of ecstatic – and dangerous – young love.

Calcium Light Night

Martins / Ives

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COMPANY PREMIERE
Peter Martins’ first ballet, from 1978 – raw, witty, combative – pits a modern young couple against each other in provocative seduction and collision. The assertive and challenging score by America’s greatest composer, Charles Ives, is complemented by the electric colors of the ultra-sleek costumes. Calcium Light Night was the first step toward George Balanchine’s choosing Martins to be his successor at New York City Ballet.

Glass Pieces

Robbins / Glass

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COMPANY PREMIERE
When Jerome Robbins premiered Glass Pieces in 1983 (with Lourdes Lopez in the original cast), The New York Times hailed it as “a picture of our times – the electronic age, the computer age.”

Because its Philip Glass score is so resonant; because it is so brilliantly structured; because its images, beginning with its huge graph-paper backdrop, are so indelible, it continues to grip and thrill audiences everywhere.

MCB is proud to add Glass Pieces to its expanding Robbins repertory, following Fancy Free, Afternoon of a Faun, Dances at a Gathering, In the Night, The Concert, Fanfare and West Side Story Suite.