Word: mendelssohns
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...become the most lucrative work in City Ballet's repertory.) Moreover, in turning to Shakespeare. Balanchine had violated one of his own favorite theories-that ballet should be pure dance and should not tell a story. But what attracted him was not so much the Shakespeare plot as Mendelssohn's familiar incidental music to Midsummer Night's Dream (the overture was written when the composer was only 17). Balanchine had wanted to work with the music ever since he first heard it as a boy in St. Petersburg, and he got his chance when City Ballet patrons...
Balanchine started-by using only the Midsummer Night's Dream music, but as the ballet grew he tossed in other bits and pieces of Mendelssohn-the overtures to Son and Stranger, Athalie, Fair Melusine, the Symphony for Strings No. 9, the "First Walpurgis Night" from Faust. He did all the choreography in two months and was still tinkering with the ballet almost to the time the curtain went...
...Midsummer Night's Dream went on too long. Mendelssohn's music soon began to sound too sugary, and Balanchine, although unfailingly clever, offered few novel ideas. Nevertheless, he and the City Ballet had produced a sure crowd rouser ("Every night," said Balanchine, "I go to bed and say 'Thank you, Mr. Mendelssohn' "). Chances were excellent that Midsummer Night's Dream would become exactly what its backers hoped-"a Nutcracker for grownups...
After the guests had taken their chairs, Casals bent over his 250-year-old Goffriller violoncello and, with a characteristic grimace, began to draw out the golden notes of Mendelssohn's Trio in D Minor. Then there were Schumann's fluid Adagio and Allegro and five Concert Pieces by Couperin. As an encore, Casals played his own arrangement-virtually his theme song-of the Catalan melody, Chant of the Birds...
...singers-white, Negro, Japanese, Hawaiian and Chinese. Explains pert, pony-tailed Soprano Uta Shimotskuka, 23: "With a good group like this, it was easy to attract many young singers who heard that we preferred Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina and also Faure and Poulenc to the inevitable Handel and Mendelssohn...