Balanchine first heard the 1932 Duo Concertant, composed immediately after Stravinsky's 1931 Concerto in D for violin and orchestra, in France shortly after it was written. The two instruments contribute equally to the interchange, for this is not merely a violin piece accompanied by piano. And in this ballet more than any other, Balanchine affirms the music's primacy in a stunning way.
Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky and Balanchine: a journey of invention (Yale University Press, 2002).
Duo Concertant was the most successful piece of Oct. 13, if for no other reason than that it was the only complete piece among excerpts. The ballet starts with dancers Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley standing by violinist Arturo Delmoni and pianist Elaine Chelton in the opening Cantilene, the first of five movements, because Balanchine wanted the audience to listen, "to really listen," and the two dancers come back to the musicians after each movement, as they explore the music and each other, with some unusual spotlights at the end. For those of us who like Stravinsky this is one of Balanchine's loveliest ballets to his music; it was originally done for the Stravinsky festival of 1972, a year after Stravinsky's death.
The excerpts included on Oct. 13 suffered somewhat from being excerpts, since each movement of a Balanchine ballet is closely related to the other movements. The first movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet (choreographed by Balanchine in 1966 to a Brahms piano quartet orchestrated by Schoenberg in 1937) was beautifully danced by Ashley Bouder and Russell Janzen, especially the part where Janzen did an elegant series of tour jetes in a circle around Bouder, and the final movement of Symphony in C, choreographed in 1947 by Balanchine, was as exciting as ever, with fifty-two dancers on stage, led by Erica Pereira and Troy Schumacher. As for Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering, the less said about this exercise in misanthropy and misogyny the better.
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