Ballet, Mozart perfect pairing

Mozart’s music has inspired many choreographers, including 20th-century ballet masters George Balanchine and Jiri Kylian, and relative newcomer Corey Baker. Their strongly contrasting works sit side-by-side in the Royal NZ Ballet’s Dancing with Mozart touring programme.

Russian-American Balanchine is represented by his canonical and technically exacting Divertimento 15 from 1956. Set to Mozart’s music of the same name, it echoes the music in step-for-note detail, following its structure of divisions, themes and variations with an everchanging array of formations which match the changing moods of the music.

Guest dancers Nadia Yankowsky and Veronika Part dance with authority, and soloists Kate Kadow, Sara Garbowski and Mayu Tanigaito sparkle. Joseph Skelton, Alexandre Ferreira and Wan Bin Yuan provide sound partnering and assured solos also. The corps de ballet perform with polish and we “see the music dance” as Balanchine intended.

Duncan Grimley’s completion of Mozart’s unfinished Requiem

accompanies Kiwi expat Corey Baker’s The Last Dance,

mourning the ecological disaster of melting Antarctic ice and eventual human drowning.

The slower sections of two Mozart piano concertos are the setting for two ballets by Kylian. Petite Mort (Little Death)

offers a meditation on orgasm.

The references are metaphorical yet the air is charged with sensuality.

Mozart’s Deutsche Tanze K571 provides the music for Sechs Tanzes (Six Dances ),a suite of wit, whimsy and flirtation. Both works are superbly delivered by all, with Felipe Domingos outstanding.