A Night at the Ballet

Program Notes

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 3

The 1891–1892 sketches that eventually matured to create Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 3 might have originally been intended for a symphony. In 1893, the composer picked up the materials from that abandoned project, reworked them to create the concerto.

Tchaikovsky was prepared to destroy the work if it was not sufficiently well-received by the composer and musicologist, Sergey Taneyev. Taneyev was critical of the work’s lack of virtuosity, but the piece survived. Taneyev eventually premiered the piece in 1895, which was not finally prepared nor published until after Tchaikovsky’s death.

In the composer’s final reworking, he greatly reduced the length and scope of the piece from three movements to one. It was his last completed work before succumbing to cholera in the final months of 1893.

Graeme Koehne: Powerhouse

Koehne strives to deconstruct the boundary between popular music and classical music. While his compositional methods are essentially neoclassical, his style is rooted in musics typically found beyond the walls of the concert hall—cartoons, pop music, movie soundtracks. The result is an authentically accessible product from a unique musical personality.

Powerhouse’s title is an homage to Raymond Scott, whose humorous music was featured in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. The work does not cite Scott’s material explicitly, but it is of similar spirit: rapidly varying and brightly humorous.

Koehne has gained international prominence in recent years in addition to his many accolades from his native Australia, where he has earned academic awards and served public roles on the Australia Council and as South Australia’s Composer-in-Residence.

Léo Delibes: Coppélia

At the age of 33, Delibes was commissioned by the Paris Opera to write his two large scale ballets, Coppélia and Sylvia. Coppélia is based on a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Coppélia met with immediate success on its completion in 1870 and has been held a charming favorite by succeeding ballet lovers both young and old. This staging of Coppélia is directly descended from the 1933 Nicholas Sergeyev revival for the Camargo Society, danced by members of the Vic-Wells (later Sadler’s Wells and now Royal) Ballet at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London. Sergeyev’s staging, a two-act version in which Franklin danced the czardas, was based upon choreography by Lev Ivanov and Enrico Cecchetti after the original by Arthur Saint-Léon. Later, in 1938, Sergeyev mounted Coppélia on the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, this time including the restored third act. This complete version was premiered at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, and, for the next twenty years, Alexandra Danilova and Frederic Franklin became legendary as Swanilda and Franz wherever the Ballet Russe performed.

Adapted from American Ballet Theatre.