NYCB Vol. 16 No. 5 - Donizetti Variations

Jacques d'Amboise and Melissa Hayden. Photo by Fred Fehl, 1960.

"In Holland, a country I love with most of my heart, you don't have to make a mountain out of a molehill. Molehills are what mountains are. I am thinking, probably vaguely, of the molehills of genius. George Balanchine's Donizetti Variations, a work literally thrown together for some oddly special occasion, doubtless never impressed at the time as major Balanchine. There was a good reason for this. It isn't. But it is so, comparatively, good that idly one wonders how bad a Balanchine can be before it no longer is better than almost anyone else. If you like Donizetti (that cheerful lyric voice so unfailingly personal that it is poignant) the music will be for you. Donizetti's opera Don Sebastian, obviously admirable in its time, is now forgotten—probably unjustly. In any event, the music, with its softly smoothed patina of antiquity, has a familiar charm."

--Clive Barnes, New York Times, 1967

Jacques d'Amboise and Melissa Hayden. Photos by Fred Fehl, 1960.