Word: agon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Eliot's Fragment of an Agon...
Next came the hugely complex Agon, Balanchine's danced counterpoint to Stravinsky's brilliant, abstract score (TIME, Dec. 16). Two weeks ago Balanchine presented the elaborately costumed Gounod Symphony, an intricate construction on the French composer's first symphony...
...approaching Igor Stravinsky's new ballet Agon, in première at the New York City Center last week, is through a kind of game. The game: listening to the score alone (on an excellent new Columbia disk) and trying to imagine what a choreographer could possibly make of it. Here and there the music suggests images of human activity. Fanfares sound: Are they bugle calls for some grand but ragged army? A truncated funeral march is heard: Is a man or an age being mourned? A troubadour's mandolin sounds a little sour: Is love being mocked...
...music. Rhythm alone, motion for its own sake, take over. And that is the clue to what George Balanchine has done by way of choreography. Unlike his previous "neoclassic" collaborations with Stravinsky (Apollo, Orpheus), this work is abstract dance: there are no costumes or scenery and the Greek title, Agon (contest), does not denote a conflict of plot but simply a sort of dancers' free...
Climax of the birthday celebration was a Los Angeles performance of his latest work, a ballet score titled Agon (to be given in New York next fall). Agon shows just how far he has gone with tonal-row composition. A 20-minute work, it is scored for "twelve dancers and twelve notes," calls for the largest orchestra since Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (1945). The fast, heavily percussioned score is cast in patterns of enormous rhythmic complexity. In its sheer harmonic and rhythmic invention, its virility, its brilliance of orchestration, the work is among the most dazzling music...