NYCB Presents: All Bach

The late-Baroque-period composer Johann Sebastian Bach has always been revered for the wealth and variety of his works. Two seminal ballets by the company’s founding choreographers illuminate very different Bach scores with delicacy and intricacy. Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, from 1941, employs his Concerto in D Minor for two violins with inspired energy and ingenuity, as two lead ballerinas personify each of the solo violins, supported by a male partner and a small female corps. The Goldberg Variations, which Jerome Robbins created in 1971, reveals the dancemaker at the height of his mastery, finding boundless variety in one of Bach’s most celebrated keyboard compositions. Together these two dances illuminate Bach’s musical genius through their choreographers’ peerless proficiency in the classical vocabulary of ballet.