NYCB Vol. 14 No. 2 - Danses Concertantes

Frederic Franklin & Alexandra Danilova. Photo by Constantine, 1944

Below is a review written by Edwin Denby, September 11, 1944 after the premiere of George Balanchine's Danses Concertantes for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

"The Monte Carlo opened the new dance season last night at City Center with a new ballet as beautiful and elusive as the play of bright birds in a garden, birds fluttering, stalk-ing, twittering and teasing one another; joyous birds that we watch in a summer of wartime.

"The program and the costumes did not explain anything. The above is the reviewer's account of the new Danses Concertantes, choreography by George Balanchine, music by Igor Stravinsky, costumes and backdrops by Eugene Berman. It is a sumptuous and yet a delicate production, and it is all of a piece. It was greeted with cheers last night, as a work so rich in sensuous delight and one so perfect in workmanship de-served. But even after the loud applause, the new piece keeps a strangeness in its joyous flutter that is fascinatingly elusive.

Igor Stravinsky congratulates Danilova and Franklin

"Danses Concertantes is a ballet without a plot, a suite of dances. One can distinguish a sort of flirtation between the two stars-a flirtation that they know beforehand will come out happily, but that they do for fun. Twelve other dancers, divided in groups each with two girls and one boy, form the chorus; and each group has a special little number of its own. The effervescence and the grace of the dance invention all through is extraordinary; here and there are little jokes, jokes of style like the jazz steps, or like the entwining figures that dancers make holding hands; but nothing is emphatic, it is all lightly done, and already they are doing something else.

"Astonishing is the ease with which Balanchine understands the flow of the unsymmetrical periods of the music and gives them a visual grace and a logic that illuminates the musician's musical intentions. The music is delicious instrumentally, but it is very firm in its melodic and rhythmic logic, and the absence of any rhetoric gives it a gentle serenity that is strangely bewitching. It is that rarity, a modest masterpiece.

"The costumes and backdrops by Berman are so striking that they stopped the show. They are also of an originality in elegance that we all too rarely see on the New York stage. A ballet that is choreographically, musically and scenically first class is a big event in the dance world at any time and any-where; the Monte Carlo is to be thanked for giving us once more that great pleasure, a real ballet production. That the work makes no effort to impress by scale makes it, if one may say so, all the more touching."