Choreography: George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust
Music: Serenade for Strings in C, Op. 48
Composer: Peter Ilyitch Tschaikovsky
World premiere: 6 June 1934, School of American Ballet, White Plains , New York
Ballet Length: Approx 33 minutes
Serenade is a milestone to Balanchine, so as it is in dance history. It was the first ballet George Balanchine choreographed in America. Serenade has come to be considered the signature piece of the New York City Ballet and is one of Balanchine's most widely performed works. It will be premiered by SDT on 25 and 26 June 2010, at Esplanade Theatre, as one of the contemporary pieces in Masterpiece In Motion. It features a full company of 20 female and six male dancers, with three of them as major and will be a landmark addition to SDT’s performance repertoire.
It was on the opening night of the first performance of New York City Ballet and has never left their performance repertory since. It has been danced by London’s Royal Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, The Australian Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, and more.
To tell a story about something is simply a very human way of saying that we understand it. Making a ballet is a choreographer's way of showing how he understands a piece of music, not in words, not in narrative form (unless he has in mind a particular story), but in dancing.
Notes on Serenade in Balanchine's Festival of Ballet by George Balanchine |
Like many of Balanchine's works, there is no concealed story in Serenade.
there are, simply, dancers in motion to a beautiful piece of music. The only story, a serenade, a dance, if you like, in the light of the moon ," revealed Balanchine.
Serenade is composed of four movements to - "Sonatina", "Waltz", "Russian Dance" and "Elegy." Like the music, it is emotionally evoking with overtones of love, loss and yearning.
The intention was to show the ballet students how dancing on stage differs from class work. Balanchine embraced the conditions and incidents in the class into the choreography. I choreographed to the music with the pupils I happened to have at a particular time. Boys began to attend the class and they were worked into the pattern. One day, when all the girls rushed off the floor area we were using as a stage, one of the girls fell and began to cry. I told the pianist to keep on playing and kept this bit in the dance. Another day, one of the girls was late for class, so I left that in too.
Balanchine was never content for ballets to stay in the past Balanchine kept revising Serenade to keep it modern throughout his whole choreographic career.
George Balanchine
 Born in St. Petersburg in 1904, George Balanchine began his dance training at the age of nine. As the son of a composer, Balanchine was also trained as a musician. This rendered him the unique ability in revealing the structure of composition through choreographic movements, which became the definitive hallmark of his style. Following an early career throughout Europe, Balanchine was invited by Lincoln Kirstein to United States to establish the School of American Ballet in 1933 and later, they co-founded the New York City Ballet in 1948. Balanchine's canon of works includes Apollo, Serenade, Symphony in C, Theme and Variations, The Four Temperaments, Allegro Brillante, Agon, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Jewels, Stars and Stripes, Who Cares, Violin Concerto, and many more.
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