Knowing the score: rehearsing Balanchine ballets is about to get easier, thanks to a new series of notated piano scores - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, July, 2002 by Susan Nisbett

THE SCORE HE WAS HANDED WAS FULL OF Xs AND SLASHES AND ARROWS. BUT PIANIST CHRISTIAN MATJIAS had little idea of the road he was traveling in 1990 when he made himself a "playable" piano reduction of the J.S. Bach Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins and Orchestra for staging rehearsals of George Balanchine's Concerto Barocco with former New York City Ballet principal Jillana. He had never seen a dance class before playing for them at the University of California, Irvine, where Jillana then taught.

Matjias found himself drawing heavily on skills he developed interpreting early music scores. (He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in harpsichord performance.) "Everything we played, we had to reconstruct ourselves," said Matjias, whose current academic appointment at the University of Michigan School of Music straddles music and dance.

More than a decade later, with the blessing of the George Balanchine Trust and New York City Ballet, Matjias is still in the reconstruction business. He's making rehearsal scores not just for Concerto Barocco, but for two other seminal Balanchine ballets: Serenade and Apollo. The scores, due to the Balanchine Trust in summer 2003 as "The George Balanchine Critical Editions," will meet not just rehearsal pianists' needs, but dancers'. The Balanchine Trust will own the physical scores and can dispatch them, with copyright permission when needed (as in the case of Igor Stravinsky's Apollo), when the ballets are set on companies licensed to perform them.

"The scores will be user-friendly, practical working scores, not carbo-heavy, library-use-only scores," says Matjias, who received a university grant that provides resources and covers travel expenses for the project.

Still, Matjias's new type of score may look more like literature than music. Why? It reflects not just the notes (corrected where necessary and even "improved"), but also the rehearsal indications by City Ballet personnel--Balanchine, for example, and former Music Director Gordon Boelzner--that evoke, epigrammatically, key moments and characters: "head swings" (Apollo) or "aspirin" (refers to the "headache" step in Serenade, where five girls bring the back of the hand to the forehead) or "Diana foot forward" (from a later score of Concerto Barocco used by Jillana; this entry identifies a step by Diana Adams in the third movement).

Drawing on his experience of playing for these ballets as they were staged at venues across the country, examining them with key figures (Boelzner and Principal Conductor Hugo Fiorato on the musical side at New York City Ballet; Balanchine ballerinas Jillana, Maria Tallchief, and Merrill Ashley on the terpsichorean side), watching archival footage and poring over Balanchine-approved, Labanotated scores with notator Tina Curran, Matjias will produce documents as rich in text and counsel as in melody.

Fewer musical systems (braces of treble and bass clefs) per page--two or three versus the usual five--make way for great reading between the lines. There will be information about successive variants of score, steps, and tempi (typically fastest in the 1950s and slower today in these three dances; relying on dancers' memories and videos, while imperfect, is the only way to judge tempi); and choreographic notes that clarify "whodunit" details identified with movement phrases--who moves when and what they do. Unlike a typical score where music fills the page, these scores will be broken down into movement phrases.

The tasks differ by ballet. The Apollo piano reduction is by Stravinsky himself, so the notes are sacrosanct, Matjias says. He'll mainly "place" the choreography and detail musical and choreographic cuts in primary versions of the ballet.

In Serenade, Matjias is cleaning up the score, a late nineteenth-century piano arrangement of the Tchaikovsky Serenade in C for String Orchestra, Op. 48, to place the movements in correct order for dance and bring out (or write in) critical lines--like the first-movement inner cello line that dancers need to hear. He'll also indicate the repeat in the Waltz, a Balanchine addition to the original score--and tackle the eight measures in the Russian Dance that Balanchine omitted, probably until the late 1950s.

If Matjias's Concerto Barocco re-do simplifies the pianist's life, it also improves the dancers' lot. A lighter, more contrapuntal accompaniment, rolled chords instead of stodgy, solid ones, and a pianistic filling out of harmonies permit more rhythmic, natural playing--and therefore a better ground for dancing.

A year ago, Matjias's momentum slowed briefly when Amtrak lost his luggage--including two scores and all his clothes--on a New York trip to meet with Barbara Horgan, trustee of the George Balanchine Trust. The bags are still AWOL, but with scores replaced, it's allegro molto to the finish.

Christian Matjias's rehearsal scores are yet one more resource for companies staging Balanchine's works. The Balanchine Foundation Video Archives, twenty-one tapes that reside in forty-three libraries and resource centers around the world, show dancers who worked with Balanchine coaching later generations of dancers and include interviews and discussions by dance scholars and journalists. The tapes preserve choreography no longer in repertoire along with the interpretations of Balanchine-era dancers. Seven new tapes were added in March, featuring excerpts from Raymonda, The Four Temperaments, Donizetti Variations, Bugaku, La Sonnambula, Firebird, Apollo, and Swan Lake.