Celebrate Valentine’s Day with Texas Ballet Theater, this weekend.
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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Dancing Hearts
Texas Ballet Theater starts the New Year with its annual salute to Valentine’s Day. Five romantic works are included under the umbrella title Five of Hearts. Four ballets have been staged by company director Ben Stevenson and the fifth by guest choreographer Bruce Wood. This marks the first time that Wood, the popular Fort Worth modern dance champion, has been commissioned to create a piece for Texas Ballet Theater.
He calls his new work Rheology (the study of the deconstruction of the movement of matter), another way, Wood says, of describing how material can be simplified each time around, in this case the waltz. He set the piece to the last movement of the Tchaikovsky Third Suite for Orchestra, the same music George Balanchine used for his ballet Theme and Variations. The Ballet Guild of Fort Worth has underwritten the project.
The program opens, appropriately, with Stevenson’s dance setting of Richard Wagner’s Wesendonck Songs, the love poems Wagner wrote for Mathilde Wesendonck, his lover in whose house he was staying at the time. Music from the poem Träume, which Wagner arranged for chamber orchestra and had once sung under her window on the morning of her birthday, later found its way into a love duet in Tristan and Isolde. Melissa Givens sings the poems here.
Three pas de deux will complete the program — the sparkling Don Quixote, Vivaldi, and excerpts from Stevenson’s Three Preludes.
Jack Buckhannan will be piano soloist as well as conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony. — Leonard Eureka
Fri-Sun, at Bass Performance Hall, 555 Commerce St, FW. $16-95. 877-212-4280.
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