“This Serenade is amazing, caught up in coarse shadows on a claustrophobic stage and still it flies into infinity. Fascinating, how intimate is the Waltz Girl’s final fall. Except it’s not a fall. It’s a death roll, Diana Adams turning in the arms of Jacques d’Amboise, simultaneously rolling and falling in a horrific hydraulic. Today this sequence is much more stylized, but here, in 1957, these two were caught in a turbulent narrative. Diana’s body on the ground is not a graceful pose–she is marked, stricken! Jacques, bending over her, is stricken too. This is not the Serenade we were seeing by the 1970s. We know that in so many instances Balanchine was stylizing away from the “exciting event,” as Freud would say. So here it is, as it was — exciting!”
Archives
Blogroll
- Amazon
- Barns
- Citibike stations
- Ephemeral NY
- Glimmerglass Opera Festival
- Glyndebourne Festival (England)
- Gothamist
- Harlem Bespoke
- Ivy Style
- Joseph Urban Collection at Columbia University in the City of New York
- Kurt Weill Foundation
- La Fenice Venice
- Lincoln Center Summer Festival
- Mayflower Society
- Metropolitan Opera
- Monteverdi Choir
- Municipal Arts Society
- Museum of the City of New York
- National Jazz Museum in Harlem (Smithsonian)
- National Women's Rights Historical Park at Seneca Falls, NY
- Opera America
- Oratorio Society of New York
- Patel and Waterman's History of NY
- Ted Talks
- Tenement Museum blog
- The (Manchester) Guardian
- Walking holidays in England
- Wiener Staatsoper
- Yale Art Gallery