George Balanchine called the exuberant Allegro Brillante “everything I know about classical ballet in thirteen minutes.”

One of George Balanchine’s most joyous, pure dance pieces, Allegro Brillante is characterized by what Maria Tallchief — the ballerina on whom the bravura leading role was created — called "an expansive Russian romanticism." The ballet is set to Tschaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 3, a work that the composer created from sketches for a composition that was intended to be his Sixth Symphony, but which instead served as a single movement work which was published posthumously in 1894. Balanchine described this ballet as a concentrated essay in the extended classical vocabulary, in which a maximum amount of choreographic development is contained within a rather restricted area of time and space.

Rooted in the court dances of 18th-century France, Le Tombeau de Couperin mesmerizes with its seamless patterns and symmetrical groupings of dancers.

In 1919 Maurice Ravel composed "Le Tombeau de Couperin” (“The Tomb of Couperin”), a commemorative suite for piano in six movements, in memory of six friends who died in World War I. He was inspired by the style of François Couperin, a French Baroque composer. In 1920, Ravel orchestrated four of the pieces, which make up the score for this ballet.

Balanchine choreographed Le Tombeau de Couperin for New York City Ballet’s 1975 Ravel Festival, and, like the composer, he incorporated French Baroque style and devices into a work with a modern sensibility. The eight couples are divided into left and right quadrilles, and each quadrille forms geometric patterns — diagonals, diamonds, squares — as they dance in unison or echo the movements of the opposite side.

A sweeping romantic work for 55 dancers, the Austro-Hungarian-inflected Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet ends in an intoxicating finale.

Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25 (1861) marked a new development in chamber music. Though it received mixed reviews at the time of its premiere, it proved to be deeply influential for a number of 20th-century composers, laying the groundwork for atonality. Among the work’s admirers was Brahms’ great Viennese successor, Arnold Schoenberg, who in 1937 arranged the quartet for orchestra. In a letter to Dr. Alfred Frankenstein, the distinguished critic and musicologist of the San Francisco Chronicle, Schoenberg gives his reasons for this somewhat surprising undertaking: “1. I love the piece. 2. It is seldom played. 3. It is always very badly played, as the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and one hears nothing of the strings. I wanted for once to hear everything, and this I have achieved.” Balanchine often visited Stravinsky in Hollywood, and the composer would make suggestions of unfamiliar scores that might be suitable for ballet. In 1957, he played Balanchine a version of the Gounod Symphony, which the choreographer set the following year. In 1964, similarly, came the suggestion of Schoenberg’s orchestration of Brahms’ quartet, and Balanchine premiered the ballet in 1966, two years after NYCB’s move from City Center to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.

Music:

Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25 (1861), orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg (1937)