Everything was beautiful at the...

I finally finished the piece! Today I completed the final score of Connection for percussionist. This is a piece that I've been working on for three solid months, nearly every day. That's a lot of time to produce six minutes of music for one player! Dozens of pages of sketches, hundreds upon hundreds of musical ideas written down and rejected, four drafts...But as my previous post elaborated, I've learned so much from the process, and I feel that I'm really growing as a composer - so every hour of work has been worth it. I'm quite eager to hear it played someday - Sean Statser, who commissioned the work, will learn it this year, and I hope that some of my other percussionist friends who enjoy ridiculous musical challenges will also give it a shot.

And as they sing in the chorus line, everything was beautiful…

...at the ballet
We went to two marvelous ballet performances recently. The Ballet Gala at the Staatsoper presented two large-ensemble pieces of late 19th-century choreography, set to light ballet music, very elegant and traditional. I didn't realize that the male parts consist mostly of acrobatic leaps and twists, but the men did these with great finesse. The women performed with blend of intense energy and intense poise, and Rosalind later told me that much of what they were doing was in fact extremely difficult. In a way, it's like watching the Olympics - I'm impressed by the feats of skill, but I don't even know half of what's really amazing about the performance, since I haven't been a platform diver or a ballet dancer myself. The rest of the gala featured small-ensemble settings of Philip Glass and Mozart, quite modern and exciting dancing, sometimes a dizzying array of people rushing on and off stage and several groups executing different moves simultaneously, other times very sparse and introverted.

The other performance we saw was a full-length ballet adaptation of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina, with music by Tchaikovsky, and new choreography by Boris Eifman. This was an emotionally powerful event, with every dancer conveying such subtlety of expression, that one had no need for words or singing to get in the way. Of course that's the idea, that a ballet tells a story of characters through dance and instrumental music, but what set this apart from other ballets I've seen is that every dance really had a meaning in the story, expressed the character's feelings or the complex relationships between characters. The company was half men and half women - contrast this to the classical pieces at the Ballet Gala, where two men danced with thirty women! Rosalind noted that the male dancing was quite masculine in Anna Karenina, also in a realistic sense, and in contrast to classical ballet.

The music was gorgeous, richly orchestrated and musically varied. There were times when I had to stop watching and just listen for a minute. Some of the music I knew I'd heard before, and only much later did I do a little research and find that, in fact, there is no Anna Karenina by Tchaikovsky. (That was a shock!) That is, the choreographer selected movements and excerpts from many of Tchaikovsky's orchestral works and put them in an order which would correspond to scenes in the ballet. It worked extremely well - after virtually millions of performances of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, I bet the ghost of Tchaikovsky is quite pleased to see a ballet danced to some of his other music!

This production took the liberty of interpolating some truly strange avant-garde electronic music at a few dramatic points, during some of Anna's solo dances representing her inner turmoil, and at the ending. Like all the Russian literature that I'm aware of, it's a powerful and tragic story, and it ends with Anna throwing herself under the wheels of a train. They portrayed this by having the full cast dancing the part of the train, moving back and forth in mechanical rhythm, and then Anna falls from the stage's second-story into the midst of them as the music and lights cut out. Enough to make your heart stop for a minute.

You can see a few photos of an earlier production and read more about it here. Happy St. Patrick's Day! (Another holiday not officially celebrated here, although I did see one tramful of green-outfitted partygoers this weekend...)