Lincoln Center at Home: American Ballet Theatre

Lincoln Center at Home showed a performance from 1978 of Fokine's Les Sylphes to Chopin music orchestrated by Benjamin Britten, Petipa's pas de deux from Don Quixote to the music of Leon Minkus, Balanchine's Theme and Variations to the music of Tschaikovsky and Fokine's Firebird to the music of Stravinsky.

For me, of course, Theme and Variations was the outstanding ballet on this program.  It was originally done by Balanchine for American Ballet Theatre in 1947 and in 1970 became part of Balanchine's Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3 for the New York City Ballet, where it is an astounding climax to Balanchine's choreography for the entire suite.  This staging, originally broadcast on PBS in 1978 focused mainly on the leading dancers, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland, who were at the peak of their careers and who were terrific together, Baryshnikov executing the difficult tours en l'air followed by multiple pirouettes perfectly.  Unfortunately the camerawork lost the forest for the trees and missed a great deal of the complexity and speed of the corps.
Fokine's Les Sylphes dates from 1908 and is unusual in being dreamlike and almost all adagio.  It was elegantly danced --to Chopin music orchestrated by Benjamin Britten -- by Ivan Nagy, Eleanor D'antuovo, Rebecca Wright, and Mariana Tcherkaasy.  Fernando Bujones and Natalia Makarova danced the pas de deux from Pepita's Don Quixote, almost something of a circus act to Leon Minkus's music, with Makarove doing pas de cheval before balancing beautifully on pointe. The last ballet was a rather tedious Firebird, to the Stravinsky score, with the exception of an impressively regal Cynthia Gregory in the title role.

To me what was most interesting about this program was how clearly it demonstrated the influence on Balanchine by Fokine and Petipa and how far beyond them he went with his brilliant and complex choreography.