Edvard Grieg's music in ballet?

[Amanda_K]

What ballets has Edvard Grieg's music been used in, if any?

[Amy Reusch]

Peer Gynt has been done... I'm not sure by which companies/choreographers... but I googled for you and there's at least this about Ben Stevenson's version for Houston Ballet in 1985:

DANCE: HOUSTON BALLET PRESENTS 'PEER GYNT'

THERE are some highly touching moments in ''Peer Gynt,'' the two-act ballet by Ben Stevenson which the Houston Ballet presented for the first time in New York at the City Center Friday night.

Edvard Grieg's incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play, supplemented by other Grieg compositions, provides - unsurprisingly - just the right emotional impetus for such scenes.

I have this memory of a British children's magazine showing photos of a Peer Gynt ballet in the 1970s? done by I imagine a British company... but I'm not sure. I'm sure a little research would turn it up.

[rg]

the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts/Dance Collection has over 50 indications of dances made to Grieg's music.

the choreographers include Doris Humphrey, Mary Wigman, Fedor Lopukhov, Aleksandr Gorsky, Maurice Bejart, Ted Shawn, Arthur Mitichell, , Leonid Jakobson, Ben Stevenson (see above post), Peter Breuer, among several others.

some of the ballets use Peer Gynt, others a concerto, others include music selections among which Grieg is listed.

you'll find a good amount when you do your research.

[bart]

Here's a LINK to an earlier thread on Peer Gynt:

http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/lofiver...php/t21276.html

[rg]

additionally george balanchine and eliot feld, and others for all i know, choreographed SONG OF NORWAY, an operetta which has adaptations of grieg's music.

[bart]

As a child I attended the opening of Guy Lombardo's version of Song of Norway, at the Jones Beach Amphitheater on Long Island. The stage was on a kind of island separated from the audience by a lagoon on Zach's Bay. I don't remember if the production had dancers, but it certainly did have water skiiers.

[Amy Reusch]

Now if I'd just get my act together and get back to work on Doris Humphrey's Grieg Concerto as I am supposed to, perhaps I'd remember such things! (where's the emoticon for pounding one's head with a hammer?). Thank you Bart! I'm still laughing about the Song of Norway at Jones Beach. (Now that one doesn't exist in the NYPL archives does it?)

[carbro]

This one? :bash:

Or this one?

[Amy Reusch]

Come to think of it, both may be appropriate! but I was thinking of the former modified.

[leonid17]

What ballets has Edvard Grieg's music been used in, if any?

As part of the divertissement ‘Les Orientales’, commissioned by Diaghilev in 1910, Nijinsky danced a solo called ‘Kobold’ (a mischievous sprite) choreographed by Fokine to the third piece of Lyric Pieces for piano Op. 71. orchestrated by Stravinsky.

I also saw a production of 'Peer Gynt' in 1963 using the suite's of Grieg, choreographed by Vladimir Orlikovsky for London Festival Ballet.

In the 1940's Edouard Boravansky choreographed a ballet to Grieg's A minor piano Concert in that same decade Mpna Inglesby choreographed 'Twelfth Night' to Grieg,

Arthur Mitchell choreographed 'Three Movements from the Holberg Suite'. Slavko Pervan,

choreographed a version of Peer Gynt for the Croatian Ballet. If my memory serves me right I think the first danced Grieg in the USA was performed by Mikhail Mordkin.

I think a bit of Googling will show that modern dance companies as well as classial ballet companies have works to the music of Grieg.