Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky (from DanceTabs)

New York City Ballet’s winter season (aka the “Tchaikovsky Celebration”) opened this week. I caught the Wednesday performance, with Serenade, Mozartiana, and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 (once known as Ballet Imperial). It also marked Sara Mearns’ return to the stage, after a long injury. You can read my review of the performance, for DanceTabs, here.

And here’s a short excerpt:

“I’m not yet fully convinced of the wisdom of New York City Ballet’s thematic seasons, organized around the music of a single composer. A full evening of Balanchine and Stravinsky is bracing and illuminating, but a whole season can leave you begging for melody, harmonic resolution, a drop of pathos. One can’t be acerbic and witty all the time. This season it’s Tchaikovsky’s turn, and the dial flips in the opposite direction, to a sound world filled with mystery, soaring melodies, turbulent crescendi and majestic apotheoses. In other words, a welcome injection of grandeur into our mundane lives. But how long can the audience sustain this fever pitch before beginning to yearn for the sharp edge of modernism? We’ll see.”