Composer brings Le Petit Prince to life
Kevin Lau captures childlike sense of joy and loss in score for National Ballet premiere
It’s a little like the puzzler about the chicken and the egg; which comes first, the music or the choreography?
The creative team behind the National Ballet of Canada’s world premiere of Le Petit Prince — choreographer Guillaume Côté, designer Michael Levine and composer Kevin Lau — worked with a united vision of the new ballet.
“For the most part, the music comes first,” Lau said before Saturday’s opening at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
“I would write music for a particular scene. Once Guillaume was comfortable he’d create the choreography.”
Lots of attempts were discarded along the way.
“But maybe it wasn’t quite the right sound and we’d go back to the drawing board,” says Lau, who adds he threw away enough material for a whole other ballet.
The process began more than three years ago when Côté handed the book to Lau and asked him to read it for pleasure and “not intellectualize it.”
He loved the story by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry of the aviator taken on adventures by a little boy. They travel to another planet, meeting an array of characters including a king, a lamplighter, a geographer, fox, flower and snake.
“I felt like I’d gone on a journey,” says Lau. “There was a sense of joy and a sense of loss. There are many large moments of emotion and other parts are dreamy, uplifting.”
What Lau was trying to capture was the “childlike aspect of the music; certain things are exaggerated like anxiety and sorrow.”
When he was finally selected for the production, he reread the book, noting how it worked on multiple levels.
Since Lau had never composed a ballet before, he became a student of dance.
He watched Côté dance in Nijinsky and also in Romeo and Juliet.
He was surprised to learn that the music used in Nijinsky, of Dmitri Shostakovich, Chopin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, was not written for a ballet but “borrowed.”
But Côté wanted original music for Petit Prince and instructed Lau “to write from the heart” to find a way to bring the piece to life.
While the music will be recognizably symphonic, “there are influences from all over the place. I didn’t want to be boxed in. I wanted to give this its own voice.”
National Ballet music director David Briskin, who’ll lead the National Ballet Orchestra, says the music in Le Petit Prince reflects the characters or chapters of the novella.
“I was the matchmaker. I knew the composer (who recently served as composer in residence with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra) and knew he would be a good match.”
His verdict on the new piece: “It is a very good score. To my ear, there are sections of the ballet that can be lifted and heard on a concert stage. It is music that can stand on its own.”