NYCB Vol. 14 No. 9 - Concerto Barocco

Edwin Denby on Concerto Barocco in 1945: “The correspondence of eye and ear is at its most surprising in the poignant adagio movement. At the climax, for instance, against a background of chorus that suggests the look of trees in the wind before a storm breaks, the ballerina, with limbs powerfully outspread, is lifted by her male partner, lifted repeatedly in narrowing arcs higher and higher. Then at the culminating phrase, from her greatest height he very slowly lowers her. You watch her body slowly descend, her foot and leg pointing stiffly downward, till her toe reaches the floor and she rests her full weight at last on this single sharp point and pauses. It is the effect at that moment of a deliberate and powerful plunge into into a wound, and the emotion of it answers strangely to the musical stress.”

This footage shows Melissa Hayden and Conrad Ludlow in an archival filming recorded stage in 1969. Originally posted by John Clifford on YouTube