Joffrey Ballet & Cleveland Orchestra @ Blossom Music Center 8/20/11
The Joffrey Ballet and The Cleveland Orchestra once again paired to create a magical weekend of music and movement in the already near-enchanted ground of Blossom. This, the third year in a row the two companies have combined, featured a stunning five works (best program yet) that showed (nay, flaunted) the dancers’ remarkable combination of athleticism and grace.
While the weather proved balmy on Saturday night, many in the lawn crowd moved into the general admission seats in the pavilion so they could get a better look at the dancers (a few were even spotted using field glasses — great idea).
The works included “Night” (a woman, dreaming, flits through a Marc Chagall-type landscape); a pas de deux from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” (no, no crazy ballerina from “Black Swan” appeared, just a couple of sweethearts dancing together); an excerpt from “Othello” (my favorite duet; it combined drama, lithe, sexy dancing — all to suggest that the Moor’s passionate love wasn’t enough to overcome Iago’s treacherous lies), and a Balanchine work set to Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto in D (with soloist Jung-Min Amy Lee) that incorporated versions of Georgian folk dance scenes featuring different ensembles. Tito Muñoz, who toured with the ballet last season, conducted.
If there’s anything musical that’s better than superb dancing (even though it’s early in the Joffrey season) accompanied by our world-class orchestra, don’t tell me: I’m still enjoying the memories.
Just a little bit left of Blossom summer coming up: Bugs Bunny at the Symphony (Bugs Bunny: Ultimate interpreter of classical music!) on Sat 9/3 & Sun 9/4 followed by the super-big, stage-filling Beethoven’s Ninth (a seeming cast of 1,000s that includes soloists, chorus, and orchestra) on Sat 9/10.
For more information or tickets go to http://ClevelandOrchestra.com.
[Photo: Othello Duet w/ April Daly & Fabrice Calmels. Photo by Herbert Migdoll.]
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.
Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.