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Alongside Balanchine’s Palais de Cristal, set to music by Bizet, Benjamin Millepied adapts Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. Philippe Jordan will be accompanying the Paris Opera Ballet for the first time.

This encounter between two great French composers and two choreographers from the New York City Ballet, its founder George Balanchine and former student Benjamin Millepied, highlights the similarities and dissonances between them. In 1947, George Balanchine paid tribute to the company and to the French tradition with his first production for the Paris Opera Ballet, Le Palais de Cristal, in which he choreographed an early work by Georges Bizet, the Symphony in C. Characterized by its architectural design and sense of dialogue with the music, this ballet is a model of academic virtuosity, to which Christian Lacroix, an artisan of light and color, has brought new shape. Benjamin Millepied’s third creation for the Paris Opera Ballet, in collaboration with the conceptual artist Daniel Buren, revisits the myth of Daphnis and Chloé. In the tradition of Balanchine, Millepied draws his inspiration from the rhythms and colors of Ravel’s “choreographic symphony” for chorus and orchestra. Accompanying the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet for the first time, Philippe Jordan conducts these masterpieces of French music.

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Le Palais de Cristal

In February 1947, George Balanchine – who became American in 1939 – sailed to France aboard the “America”. He was invited by George Hirsch to become the director of the ballet at the Palais Garnier Ballet for several months. He introduced Apollo musagète, a key work of the Ballets Russes era. He brings his first American choreographies to the Garnier, Serenade and Le Baiser de la Fée, and created Crystal Palace a ballet in tribute to the French school. A composition based on the Symphony in C major – a George Bizet score that had discovered after having been forgotten for a century, the Crystal palace ballet, with its fifty performers, will begin a continuous success.

In March 1948, the ballet – renamed Symphony in C (American translation of the musical score) – was presented in New York in front of the members of the Ballet Society, founded in 1946 by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Seven months later, the piece became part of the repertoire of the renewed New York City Ballet and immediately seduced the American public. Each dance sequence of the Crystal Palace refers to costumes inspired by different colors of precious stones – rubies, black diamonds, emeralds and pearls – that idea grow again in Balanchine Jewels in 1967.

Daphnis et Chloé  / Benjamin Millepied

 

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Daphnis et Chloe

Taken from The pastoral novel Daphnis and Chloe Loves attributed to Greek poet Longus (second century AD), this subject would inspire Maurice Ravel’s most developed composition, in which Igor Stravinsky saw “one of the most beautiful works of French music.”

Daphnis et Chloé  / Benjamin Millepied

Argument

In the spring, at the edge of a grove, young men and girls come to bring offerings to the altar of the Nymphs. Daphnis and Chloe meet and the couple walk towards the altar. Chloe shows some jealousy seeing Daphnis dance with some young girls; she herself is drawn into the round of young people and the herdsman Dorcon, who is very enterprising. Daphnis, all alone, dreams of Chloe. Lyceion seeks to trouble him. And the drama occurs. Chloe is kidnapped by pirates. Daphnis surrenders to desolation. Nymphs of the altar come alive, console Daphnis and call the god Pan in his favor.

Pirates, drunk with joy and madness, force Chloe to dance for them. Their leader, Bryaxis, is about to take the girl, when the god Pan appears and make them run away, freeing Chloe.

In the pastoral atmosphere of morning Daphnis wakes up and finds Chloe, saved by the god Pan in memory of the nymph Syrinx ( beloved by Pan, she escaped his enthusiasm and was transformed into reeds. Pan cut the reeds and made de the instrument that is now called syrinx or panpipes). The two lovers thank Pan and Syrinx. Then, in the general joy, they all celebrate the love of Daphnis and Chloe.