seasonal music at the ballet

Thanks to my bank, my daughter and I enjoyed a night out at the Northern Ballet Theatre’s production of Beauty and the Beast. It was the first time I’d been to the ballet for many years, and rather than one of the standards, we saw a recently created ballet with a score made out of existing music, mostly played live and complementing the action well. There was the diversion of identifying the pieces without having previously looked them up in the programme. They were mostly French, including Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and, more strikingly, part of Poulenc’s Organ Concerto. Something that totally floored me was extracts from The Seasons by Glazunov. Vivaldi is the only composer really to have nailed this theme. Others who’ve had a go include Tchaikovsky and Haydn, but the results aren’t among their greatest works.