Klavier

Did she say anything about seat selection for net purchases? I think that is the bread-and-butter issue.

I just sent off an email on that subject, and will report back.

Dancers do seem to like all kinds of music. However, I suspect that few would listen to Minkus-Pugni, or even Adam-Delibes or Tchaikovsky, on their time off.

I don't think I would listen to Minkus-Pugni, or even Adam-Delibes on my time off! (Tchaikovsky is another story.)

But part of what I'm getting is that I would think to dance many of the more demanding scores in at least a repertory like that of NYCB - which includes complex 12-tone pieces like Webern's Concerto and Symphony (for Balanchine's Episodes) and Berg's Violin Concerto (for Robbins's In Memory Of), one does need an above-average understanding of some quite difficult music. These are scores that many classical music lovers and even some musicians I know find completely opaque ("atonal crap," in the words of one friend of mine). I wonder if there are dancers who would throw up their hands given such an assignment and say, "I can't make any sense of this music at all! I'd rather do 64 fouettés in Swan Lake than dance to this noise!" (Of course they may not have a choice.) Do pieces like the ones I've named tend to be more difficult for dancers to learn and perform as a direct result of the musical context?

I'm not sure where I'm going with any of this, but it does strike me that if a dancer is to manage such an assignment, they have to have some grasp of the music beyond the ordinary. And it would seem that at least at SAB, there is some attempt to educate students in understanding music, and perhaps to include some of the difficult scores they might have to deal with as professionals:

Each student's progress toward professionalism is inextricably related to his or her understanding of music. The School's music curriculum (for levels B1, B2, C1 and Intermediate Men) develops and strengthens not only students' musical skills but begins effectively to cultivate musical sensitivity and understanding. In the first year, students learn basic rhythm training and the harmonic system. In the second and third years, students begin developing musical sensitivity by listening, learning musical terminology and history; and they become familiar with composers, especially those associated with dance.

Kind of a rambling, inconclusive post, I know - but just trying to see if it sparks some interesting replies.

I agree with Klavier in that I found the soloist in the first concerto a bit too mechanical in the rather strict adherence to the solo piano.

It occurred to me later that Morris might have had a purpose in doing that, in terms of the overall structure of the evening. In the more "immature" 11th concerto, one finds a clear break between soloist and accompanying orchestra. In the more mature 27th, he turns away from that towards a more social approach where solo and orchestra are more equal. Possibly.

I was wondering why all the men came out at the very beginning, never to be heard from again for the first concerto.

I thought that was odd too and was expecting the men to return in the finale. But perhaps he was just introducing the entire cast or most of it at the start of the evening, and was thinking of the suite of three dances as a unit exploring a trajectory from youth to maturity and not just three isolated works. His choice of titles - Eleven vs. Twenty-Seven - suggests such an interpretation, though the Koechel numbers for these concertos, 413 and 597, both place them within Mozart's last ten years in Vienna, safely within his more "mature" period.

Thanks to those who wrote nice comments on my last post.

Was anyone else there?

I don't have the experience in going to dance programs and critiquing them that most of you have here, but for what it's worth, I was there, and I found my engagement with the dance and dancers growing as the evening progressed.

Of the Mozart piano concertos, K. 413 and 595 are actually not among my most favorites, especially the former. And since I often enjoy dancing more when I enjoy the music being danced to, the first ballet seemed just "okay" to me. In the first movement I found the device of using Lauren Grant to represent the piano soloist a bit mechanical; every time Emanuel Ax played a passage there she'd be - until the cadenza, where the womens' ensemble took over and the relation between music and dance seemed more flexible and inventive. The second movement was very touching, but on the whole I did feel lukewarm about this opening third of the program. And Emanuel Ax, while always a conscientious and capable pianist, has never struck me as a particularly imaginative one; yesterday evening did not change that impression.

In the 2-piano sonata, Mozart's only work for that combination and a very great piece of music in my opinion, the opening baffled me in part as I couldn't see the significance for dressing Joe Bowie in black shorts and black overcoat in contrast to the costumes for the rest of the men. But the second movement, starting with six men holding hands, dancing in a circle, with dancers snaking in and out, was mesmerizing and turned the tide for me, completely winning me over. Morris chose to use the exposition repeat, and like many a pianist, decided not to make it a literal repeat but to vary it with the addition of a seventh dancer (I could be wrong, but I think this was Noah Vinson). The movement only gained in complexity from that point, without departing from the basic circle motif. This is the point in the evening where I switched from feeling "I'm listening to Mozart, with some people moving around on stage," to "this is truly a symbiosis between music and dance in which the choreographer is illuminating the music in unexpected visual ways." It's the sort of feeling I got last year when seeing what Jerome Robbins found in Bach's Goldberg Variations, and especially the last one, the Quodlibet, where two dozen dancers fill the stage in all kinds of complicated formations. As for Morris's K 448, the finale was inventive too, but the slow movement was the high point, and probably the high point of the evening.

And then K. 595 came along, undoubtedly a very great concerto - though as I say not the one I'm most likely to turn to when wanting to hear one of the later Mozart concertos. Here the costuming motif changed completely; everyone was clothed in beautiful white, semi-sheer things that gave some visual relief from the darker shades of the first two parts. The choreography in this part struck me as uniformly terrific. Rather than represent one dancer as the soloist and the rest as the ensemble, Morris used everyone in the company as a soloist, giving each a turn on stage and often switching partners. It's hard to remember all of it especially as I don't have the best visual memory, but among the high points were how in the development section of the first movement, where Mozart is passing the dotted-note motif back and forth between strings and winds, a dancer might pop out from the wings momentarily and pop back in. The finale had the episode, noted by drb, where the one man leapt into the arms of another - a passage that deservedly drew a big laugh, until he turned from this boy-boy embrace to a boy-girl embrace within seconds. But what I liked best about this movement, and indeed most of the concerto, was the egalitarian spirit it conveyed. There were no "principals" with a "corps" behind them purely as supporting mechanisms; instead, every dancer had his or her own thing to say; every one seemed equal with no one more important than any one else.

Harold Hodgkin is a fine artist (there's at least one fine piece by him at MoMA), but I didn't find his backdrops especially compelling or their symbolism clear. But I would definitely recommend this program to any one who can get tickets for tonight's performance. For what it's worth, Rockwell in the Times also gave it a rave.

I am curious. Do dancers generally use musical scores when learning their roles? are they generally well-versed in reading music? or do they work with recordings of standard works, or just the rehearsal pianist? I am much more a musical person than a dance person, and as it happens I have two study scores sitting besides my desk at the moment: one is a complete Sleeping Beauty, which just arrived in today's mail, and the other is my old copy of Stravinsky's Agon.

Obviously much of the Sleeping Beauty music can be heard in clear 8-bar phrases that are easily memorized; I don't think it would be a huge effort to memorize a section from a recording. But Agon is a whole other story rhythmically: to the "naked ear" on hearing a recording you might think the opening pas de quatre starts on a downbeat with the first chord and continues to the next downbeat with the next. But in fact the first chord is syncopated, an offbeat to the third beat in a 4/8 measure; the next chord is an offbeat to the first beat in the second measure. And then there all the meter shifts - 4/8 to 3/8 and back throughout the movement. Later sections of Agon are even more complicated, perhaps the most difficult being the Bransle Gay, where the castanets are written in a steady 3/8 rhythm and the flutes, bassoons, and harp shift between 7/16, 5/16, and 3/8, only occasionally in synch with the percussionist. Just how does a dancer learn such rhythms and how to coordinate his or her movements with them? The Stravinsky Movements for Piano and Orchestra is if anything worse.

Another question regarding musicality. Do dancers - who everyday experience some of the gretest classical scores, like Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bach - tend to take a greater interest in classical music than the public at large? or are these scores "what they do at work," and they have other musical interests when they're not dancing?

Since I could not find any reference here to last year's program at the Miller Theater - when members of both NYCB and the San Francisco Ballet danced three works choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to the music of the late Hungarian composer Gyorgi Ligeti - I thought I'd start this thread as a heads-up for anyone interested in this year's program, which will be three performances in September to dances by Tom Gold, Edwaard Liang, and Brian Reeder. Dancers currently scheduled to appear will be Ashley Bouder, Craig Hall, Sterling Hyltin, Maria Kowroski, Georgina Pazcoguin, Tiler Peck, Ana Sophia Scheller, Sean Suozzi, Wendy Whelan, and members of the ABT Studio Company.

Miller Theater at Columbia is an intimate space that hosts some of New York's most interesting concerts of both early and contemporary music. The box office for the new season just opened, and you can order tickets online at www.millertheater.com (with individual seat selection - hooray!). I hope this announcement will be of interest if anyone here wasn't already aware of this event.

UI changes are relatively inexpensive compared to integrating an online ticketing system with the website and the box office. I agree, though, that seat selection is expected from the top arts organizations. (The Bolshoi site is a dream this way.) One of my frustrations with both Ticketmaster and the PNB websites is that they select the "best" seats for you. I don't often agree with the computer's definition of best, especially as a short person, and the section choices are rarely refined to allow aisle vs. center, rows 1-10 vs. rows 11-20, etc. in the orchestra. As a result, I waste the time of a box office person to be able to get the seats I want.

Of course integrating online ticketing is an expense. But the NYC Opera, using the exact same venue, offers seat selection when you buy tickets online! So evidently software for the State Theater is already in place, though whether it's compatible with the NYCB site is another issue. (I misspoke in my previous comment. I thought the ticketing problem pertained to the State Theater. But it's just NYCB.)

It is obvious NYCB's site is unfinished, with dancer biographies out of date and new dancers not yet covered. I still hold some hope that online ticketing will be integrated when the site is truly finished, and maybe one should not jump to conclusions until the season is underway.

Another area where the NYCB site could learn from the big building at the rear of the plaza would be to incorporate a true database of ballets, performers, and performances. The Met Opera site is phenomenal in this respect. With just a mouse click, one can investigate every opera presented, every cast, every performer's complete Met history, even reviews. I refer to this information quite frequently when discussing opera on other forums. I'm sure ballet fans could find equal value in a comparable database for the City Ballet.

This is my first post here, but I agree emphatically with all those who believe individual seat selection is essential. I live about 50 miles from the city and cannot get to the box office every time I want to buy tickets. I can order individual seats for every other venue I know of in New York except the State Theater. I don't mind paying a surcharge for online ordering if I know where I'm going to be sitting. I've nabbed many a great seat at the Met, Broadway theaters, Carnegie, even on trips abroad to London, Paris, and Berlin, all from my desk at home thanks to individual seat selection. The argument that this is expensive and that one should "contribute" for the privilege is completely specious. Online seat selection is what every professional arts organization is now expected to do. I could have easily lived without the pretty Flash animation and the easier scrolling if NYCB had put its energies into the most serious deficiency of their website. As it is, they've missed their opportunity and created considerable potential ill will.