Igor Stravinsky - Agon ~ Ballet for twelve dancers (1957) | Текст песни

• Тексты песен
• Igor Stravinsky
• Agon ~ Ballet for twelve dancers (1957)

Igor Stravinsky
Agon ~ Ballet for twelve dancers (1957)
Pas-de-quatre (4 male dancers)
Double pas-de-quatre (8 female dancers)
Triple pas-de-quatre (4 male + 8 female dancers)
Prelude
(First pas-de-trois: 1 male, 2 female dancers)
Sarabande-step (1 male dancer)
Gaillarde (2 female dancers)
Coda (1 male, 2 female dancers)
Interlude
(Second pas-de-trois: 2 male, 1 female dancers)
Bransle simple (2 male dancers)
Bransle gay (1 female dancer)
Bransle de Poitou (2 male, 1 female dancers)
Interlude
Pas-de-deux (1 male, 1 female dancer)
Four Duos (4 male, 4 female dancers)
Four Trios (4 male, 8 female dancers)

Südwestfunk Orchester (Baden-Baden)
Hans Rosbaud, conductor

Agon (1957) is a ballet for twelve dancers, with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by George Balanchine. Composition began in December 1953 but was interrupted the next year; work was resumed in 1956 and concluded on April 27, 1957; the music was first performed on June 17, 1957 in Los Angeles conducted by Robert Craft, while the first stage performance was given by the New York City Ballet on December 1, 1957 at the City Center of Music and Drama, New York (White 1979, 490). The composition's long gestation period covers an interesting juncture in Stravinsky's composing career, in which he moved from a diatonic musical language to one based on twelve-tone technique; the music of the ballet thus demonstrates a unique symbiosis of musical idioms. The ballet has no story, but consists of a series of dance movements in which various groups of dancers interact in pairs, trios, quartets, etc. A number of the movements are based on 17th-century French court dances – saraband, galliard and bransle.
Stravinsky laid out the ballet in a duodecimal form, with four large sections each consisting of three dances. A Prelude and two Interludes occur between the large sections, but this does not fundamentally affect the twelve-part design because their function is caesural and compensatory.
This was not the first composition in which Stravinsky employed serial techniques, but it was the first in which he used a twelve-tone row, introduced in the second coda, at bar 185. Earlier in the work, Stravinsky had employed a seventeen-tone row, in bars 104–107, and evidence from the sketches suggests a close relationship between these two rows (Smyth 1999, 121, 126–27). The Bransle Double is based on a different twelve-tone series, the hexachords of which are treated independently (Straus 2001, 143–45). Those hexachords first appear separately in the Bransle Simple (for two male dancers) and Bransle Gay (for solo female dancer), and are then combined to form a twelve-tone row in the Bransle Double. These three dances together constitute the second pas-de-trois.