Tune in every day at 1PM to hear a complete ballet---ONLY on Classic 107's Intermezzo

The Ballets Russes was an itinerant ballet company based in Paris that performed between 1909 and 1929 throughout Europe and on tours to North and South America. The company never performed in Russia, where the Revolution disrupted society. After its initial Paris season, the company had no formal ties there.

Originally conceived by impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes is widely regarded as the most influential ballet company of the 20th century, in part because it promoted ground-breaking artistic collaborations among young choreographers, composers, designers, and dancers, all at the forefront of their several fields. Diaghilev commissioned works from composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy, and artists such as Léon Bakst, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, and designer Coco Chanel.

 

Sergei Diaghilev

 

The company's productions created a huge sensation, completely reinvigorating the art of performing dance, bringing many visual artists to public attention, and significantly affecting the course of musical composition. It also introduced European and American audiences to tales, music and design motifs drawn from Russian folklore. The influence of the Ballets Russes lasts to the present day.

This week on Intermezzo, host Chris Wolf has chosen five ballets commissioned by Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes--one each day at 1PM.

We begin on Monday with Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé-- a ballet in one act and three scenes described as a "symphonie chorégraphique" (choreographic symphony). The scenario was adapted by Michel Fokine from an eponymous romance by the Greek writer Longus thought to date from around the 2nd century AD. Scott Goddard published a contemporary commentary that discussed the changes to the story that Fokine made to prepare a workable ballet scenario. The story concerns the love between the goatherd Daphnis and the shepherdess Chloé.

Ravel began work on the score in 1909 after a commission from Sergei Diaghilev. It was premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris by his Ballets Russes on 8 June 1912. The orchestra was conducted by Pierre Monteux, the choreography was by Michel Fokine, and Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina danced the parts of Daphnis and Chloé. Léon Bakst designed the original sets.

At almost an hour long, Daphnis et Chloé is Ravel's longest work. In spite of the ballet's duration, four discernable leitmotifs give musical unity to the score. The music, some of the composer's most passionate, is widely regarded as some of Ravel's best, with extraordinarily lush harmonies typical of the impressionist movement in music. Even during the composer's lifetime, contemporary commentators described this ballet as his masterpiece for orchestra.  Ravel extracted music from the ballet to make two orchestral suites, which can be performed with or without the chorus. The second of the suites, which includes much of the last part of the ballet and concludes with the "Danse générale", is particularly popular. When the complete work is itself performed live, it is more often in concerts than in staged productions.

 

 

Tuesday, host Chris Wolf has selected La Boutique fantasque, also known as The Magic Toyshop or The Fantastic Toyshop, is a ballet in one act conceived by Léonide Massine, who devised the choreography for a libretto written with the artist André Derain, a pioneer of Fauvism. Derain also designed the décor and costumes for the ballet. Ottorino Respighi wrote the music based on piano pieces by Gioachino Rossini. Its world premiere was at the Alhambra Theatre in London on 5 June 1919, performed by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

STORY

The ballet is set in France in 1860. A world-famous toymaker has created exquisite dancing dolls in his magic toyshop. The automata perform various dance routines for the prospective customers. At first the toys entertain two English ladies and an American family. Some dolls perform a tarantella for the guests, followed by other dolls dressed as playing cards who dance a mazurka. Then two dolls come in and perform another routine involving a snob and a melon vendor. New customers arrive, a Russian family, and everyone welcomes them. Five Cossack dolls enter and perform a traditional dance, followed by an animal act featuring two dancing poodles.

Then the shop-keeper introduces his most sophisticated dancing dolls, a pair of can-can dancers, a flashly-dressed man and girl, come in and perform their routine. Their dance is so enchanting that the American family decides to buy the male doll while the Russian family buys the female dancing doll. The deals are made and paid for, the dolls are placed in separate boxes and collection is arranged for the next day.

Darkness descends, but during the night the dolls magically come to life and start dancing. They are upset that the two can-can dancers who are lovers are going to be separated, and a plot is hatched to hide them before the customers return in the morning.

When the shop opens the next day and the customers come in to pick up their dolls, they discover that the can-can dancers are no longer there. The customers, not knowing about the secret life of the dolls, blame the shop owner and attack him and his assistant. In the ensuing fracas the dolls come to the shopkeeper's rescue with the Cossack dolls attacking the customers with their bayonets. Driven out of the shop, the customers watch incredulously through the window as the happy dolls and the shopkeeper dance merrily inside with the re-united can-can dancers.

According to ballet historian Cyril Beaumont the first night was packed with well-known artists and performers eagerly awaiting the new ballet. Picasso made a sketch of Massine and Lopukhova in their final pose. Lydia Lopokova and Léonide Massine were Can-can Dancers in this first performance.

 

On Wednesday we're treated to The Three-Cornered Hat (El sombrero de tres picos). Choreographed by Léonide Massine to music by Manuel de Falla, it was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev and premiered complete in 1919.

It is not only a ballet with Spanish setting but one that also employs the techniques of Spanish dance (adapted and somewhat simplified) instead of classical ballet.

The story is about a magistrate who is infatuated with a miller's faithful wife and attempts to seduce her. The story is derived from the novella by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (born in Granada) and has been traced in film several times, usually in Spanish.

During World War I Manuel de Falla wrote a pantomime ballet in two scenes and called it The Magistrate and the Miller's Wife (El corregidor y la molinera). The work was scored for a small chamber orchestra and was performed in 1917.

Sergei Diaghilev saw the premiere of El corregidor y la molinera and commissioned Falla to rewrite it. The outcome was a two-act ballet scored for large orchestra called The Three-Cornered Hat. This was first performed in London at the Alhambra Theatre on July 22, 1919. Sets and costumes were created by Pablo Picasso and choreography was by Léonide Massine. Diaghilev asked Falla to conduct the premiere but the composer felt he was not experienced enough to conduct a work so complex and he handed the baton to Ernest Ansermet after one rehearsal.

Throughout the ballet Falla uses traditional Andalusian folk music. The two songs sung by the mezzo-soprano are examples of cante jondo singing; this typically accompanies flamenco music and tells a sad story. At one point he quotes the opening of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

 

 

On Thursday, host Chris Wolf will give us not one, but two ballets commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. We begin with Les biches ("The Hinds" or "The Little Darlings") This ballet is choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska to music by Francis Poulenc. It was premiered by the Ballets Russes on January 6, 1924.

 

                                                                       

                                                                                        Francis Poulenc in the early 20s

Some consider this piece a milestone in ballet history. Poulenc was, at the time, relatively unknown. He was asked by Serge Diaghilev to write a piece based on Glazunov's Les Sylphides, which had been written seventeen years earlier. Poulenc, however, chose to base his work on the paintings of Watteau that depicted Louis XV and various women in his "Parc aux biches."

The word biche is usually translated as "doe," an adult female deer. "Does" was used as a slang for coquettish women. Poulenc described his work as a "contemporary drawing room party suffused with an atmosphere of wantonness, which you sense if you are corrupted, but of which an innocent-minded girl would not be conscious."

Diaghilev recognized the great potential of the ballet and produced it for the 1924 Ballet Russes season, bringing Poulenc into the forefront of French music. Les biches was well received by critics and liked by the fashionable audience, with Henri Malherbe of Time calling it "surprisingly intimate."

Jean Cocteau upon approving the work's unplanned grandeur wrote: "The beauty, the melancholy of Les biches results from a lack of artifice." Poulenc continually revised the music up through the 1940s, eventually reducing it to an orchestral suite in five movements.

The ballet, written in a light and frothy style, is in turns reminiscent of Mozart, Scarlatti, Franck, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky, mirroring the style of Saint-Saëns's private composition The Carnival of the Animals.

Les biches uses a hidden chorus in addition to the pit orchestra, a device found before in Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé. The set and costumes were designed by Marie Laurencin, giving a sense of upper-class fashion.

 

 

Two for the price of one, remember! On Thursday we'll also get hear Parade.  Created for the Ballet Russes in 1917 from a scenario by Jean Cocteau and music by Erik Satie, Parade was subtitled “a ballet realiste” because showed the grayness and dullness of big city life and commerce against the color, excitement and playfulness of the circus. It symbolized modern man’s loss of his inner creativity among more industrialized pursuits.

 

Erik Satie

The elaborate sets and costumes were designed by Pablo Picasso. His costume design would showcase cubism as a new direction in modern art. Léonide Massine choreographed and dance the leading role of The Chinese Conjurer.

For Satie and Picasso, it marked the first time either had worked with a ballet. It was also the first time that “noise making” instruments were featured in a classical score, giving the sense of a real city. Milk bottles, typewriters, pistol shots, sirens and a fog horn were all heard within the piece. Some have called this the first multimedia art ballet in that the collaboration included a writer, a modern art painter, an avant garde music composer and a dance choreographer. It was an unique collaboration for its time. Massine’s choreography also mixed in every day movements and simple acrobatics with classic ballet technique, something modern day choreographers like Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino would also freely mix in their own choreography.

The scene represents a Sunday Fair in Paris. There is a traveling Theatre, and three Music Hall turns are employed as Parade. There are the Chinese Conjuror, an American girl, and a pair of Acrobats. Three Managers are occupied in advertising the show. They tell each other that the crowd in front is confusing the outside performance with the show which is about to take place within, and they try, in their crudest fashion, to induce the public to come and see the entertainment within, but the crowd remained unconvinced. After the last performance, the Managers make another effort, but the Theatre remains empty. The Chinaman, the Acrobats, and the American girl, seeing that the Managers have failed, make a last appeal on their own account. But it is too late.

-Jean Cocteau, From the original Parade program, May 18, 1917, Théâtre de Châtelet, Paris, France.

 

 

Robert Joffrey had an affinity for preserving the works of ballet masters. One of the masters he truly appreciated was Leonide Massine. Click HERE to watch a segment of a fantastic documentary detailing how the Joffrey Ballet brought back this incredible work.

 

On Friday, we end the week with Pulcinella. A ballet by Igor Stravinsky based on an 18th-century play.

 

Igor Stravinsky

 

Pulcinella is a character originating from Commedia dell'arte. The ballet premiered at the Paris Opera on May 15, 1920 under the baton of Ernest Ansermet. Léonide Massine created both the libretto and choreography, and Pablo Picasso designed the original costumes and sets. It was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev.

Diaghilev wanted a ballet based on an early eighteenth-century commedia dell'arte libretto and music believed (in Diaghilev's time) to have been composed by Giovanni Pergolesi. (Although the music was then attributed to Pergolesi, much of that attribution has since proved to be spurious;some of the music may have been written by Domenico Gallo, Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer, Carlo Ignazio Monza and possibly Alessandro Parisotti.)

Conductor Ernest Ansermet wrote to Stravinsky in 1919 about the prospect, but the composer initially did not like the idea of music by Pergolesi. However, once he studied the scores, which Diaghilev had found in libraries in Naples and London, he changed his mind. Stravinsky rewrote this older music in a more modern way by borrowing specific themes and textures, but interjecting modern rhythms, cadences and harmonies.

Pulcinella is scored for a modern chamber orchestra with soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists. It is often considered to be the first piece of Stravinsky's neoclassical period.