Main Stage

PIERROT LUNAIRE

CREDITS
Music by Arnold Shönberg
Choreography by Alexei Ratmansky
Set design and costumes by Tatyana Chernova
Lighting designer: Tony Marquez
Assistant lighting designer: Alexander Naumov

Premiere: 13 February 2008, as part of the programme Diana Vishneva: Beauty in Motion, Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa, California

Running time: 35 minutes

Age category 6+

SEVEN SONATAS

CREDITS
Music by Domenico Scarlatti
Choreographer: Alexei Ratmansky
Lighting Designer: Brad Fields
Costume Designer: Holly Hynes

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
In this chamber ballet there are no tricks or demonstrations of the miracles of technique. There are none of the prescribed intrigues of a plot, and there are no sets to define the place and time of action. Just six dancers, a pianist at the instrument on the stage and the crystalline lacework of the dance, woven from nuances – both emotional and plastique. The shading of moods is traced by watercolour-melting poses and steps that sensitively respond to each note of Scarlatti's music. Although the composer referred to his sonatas as exercises to develop technique to play the harpsichord and slyly advised that no depth was to be found in them, it was in these works that the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky heard the intonations of emotional speech – youthfully carefree and ironical, anxious and dramatic, but without a maelstrom of passions. Transposing these into the language of ballet, Ratmansky has called on the dancers to retain the ceremonial quality of aristocratic dialogue. As in the 18th century, Court etiquette barely allowed voices to be raised in conversation, and Scarlatti himself was employed by a royal Court, so in the choreography the psychical anxieties are carefully screened in the refinement of the pas. And yet through this etiquette-laced restraint and mathematical clarity of composition, labyrinths of feelings are inevitably brought to light.
Olga Makarova

Premiere: October 2, 2009, ABT, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, New York
Premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre: 24 September 2020

Running time: 30 minutes

Age category 6+

CONCERTO DSCH

CREDITS
Music by Dmitry Shostakovich
Choreographer: Alexei Ratmansky
Assistant Choreographer: Tatiana Ratmanskaya
Lighting Designer: Mark Stanley
Costume Designer: Holly Hynes
Adaptation of the Lighting Design for the historic Mariinsky Theatre by Igor Karmanov

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Concerto DSCH to the music of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto is Alexei Ratmansky’s seventh ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre. Today the theatre’s repertoire includes three of his “plot” ballets – the witty and ironic Cinderella and The Little Humpbacked Horse and the laconic Anna Karenina. The company also has experience of performing Ratmansky’s plot-less ballets – fifteen years ago he staged the strikingly emotional and stylishly refined Middle Duet and the flowing and heartfelt Le Poème de l'extase. Concerto DSCH , which has no literary plot, is different – joyful, witty and totally filled with movement. It is as if Ratmansky is almost afraid of permitting a musical motif that is suitable for dance. Such miserliness in the movements, such concentration of the choreographic text is beguiling for both the dancers and the audience. Ratmansky is an inarguable master of plot-less dance who can create, with virtuoso ease, forms of virtuoso solos, duets, trios and crowd scenes and, with impeccable taste, fill them with amazing dance combinations. Concerto DSCH is just one such example. Solving the puzzle of his incredibly musical combinations has proved an engaging task for the Mariinsky Ballet.
This ballet was created in 2008 for the New York City Ballet, and it is ideal for a company that is focussed on the instrumentalism of dance and ensemble-performance. Moreover, Ratmansky refers to it as a “portrait of that company”. On the other hand, the text of Concerto DSCH and the style of the scenes it contains are full of references to Soviet realities that cannot be fully understood by American performers, while for Russian dancers and audiences it brings a whole bag of associations and raises an emotional response on more than just the choreographic content. For those unfamiliar with Soviet sculpture and have no idea of the athletics displays and well-loved-techniques of Soviet cinema from the 1920s–50s, many of Ratmansky’s high supports are simply conjured-up poses, and the gestures mere original ideas of a ballet-master. To feel and convey the energetic purposefulness of an adagio one has to see at least a few Soviet films that celebrate the sincere simplicity of meetings in the evening between loves who live next door, where a shyly stolen kiss was the limit of what was allowed. And in the energetic drive of the final crowd scene, breathing with its life-giving optimism, one can recognise the generally-accepted Soviet concept about doubts of a happy future.
Ratmansky is obviously captivated by Shostakovich’s music and the spirit of his time, and in his ballet he tenderly revives this. In the title of his ballet the choreographer uses the composer’s musical autograph (D.Sch in the German musical notation), which has no direct link to the Second Concerto but which does identify with the ballet’s style. Just like Balanchine, paying tribute to the Imperial Russian Stage, named his own ballet to piano the music Ballet Imperial by Tchaikovsky.
Concerto DSCH is Ratmansky’s second “Russian” ballet, staged abroad and brought to a Russian theatre in which much can only be fully felt and understood by Russian performers. The first was the Russian Seasons (also created with NYCB) that featured motifs of Russian folklore. Apparently paradoxically to westerns critics, the choreographer’s journey across the ocean in search of his cultural roots allowed him to distance himself from the strong traditions of the stage presence of those cultural roots and has helped him present them in a new light. With Concerto DSCH it was the same story. The production for NYCB demonstrated Ratmansky’s talent in creating varied and engaging combinations, yet always logical compositional constructions and drawings, enchanting with the free nature of his dance. The same production for the Mariinsky Theatre also brought to light a subtle stylist who can put an entire history of the Soviet era into a one-act ballet.
Olga Makarova

Premiere – 29 May 2008, New York City Ballet, New York State Theater
Premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre: 4 July 2013

Running time: 20 minutes

Dmitri Shostakovich was a fan of ballet and composed numerous dance scores in the 1930s, including The Bolt and The Bright Stream. Alexei Ratmansky has choreographed both of those works for the Bolshoi Ballet, and for New York City Ballet's 2008 spring season, Ratmansky created another work to a score by Shostakovich, this time the Piano Concerto No. 2. Shostakovich wrote the concerto in 1957 as a birthday gift for his 19-year-old son Maxim, and it displays the composer's optimistic energy after the repressions of the Stalinist era. The opening allegro evokes a brisk military march with the piano referencing the British melody Drunken Sailor. By contrast, the andante movement basks in Russian soulfulness for the strings, piano, and solo horn. The brief, invigorating allegro finale takes on a 7/8 meter as the entire orchestra sprints to the finish. The ballet's title refers to a musical motif used by Shostakovich to represent himself, with four notes that, when written in German notation, stand in for his initials in the German spelling (D. Sch.).

Age category 12+