Put on your dancing shoes and join us for two weeks of ballet music. Starting in the 16th century to meet Catherine de’ Medici, and we continue to a golden age of ballet in Paris. Then we meet the Russian ballets, and finally, we will return to Paris for Ballets Russe in the years just before WWI. Our survey covers four hundred years of ballet strictly minding to the principles of Classical form with turnouts and arabesques all choreographed to music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Tchaikovsky, and Gluck. Ballet changed in Paris on the evening of May 29, 1913, when Nijinsky danced from his pelvis to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Here we leave you plopped on the doorstep of Modern dance — that is music for another day.
A Modest Survey of Ballet Music, Part 1
