This is just to remind you (yet again, and probably not for the last time) that Our Girl and I will be making our joint radio debut this Sunday night, opposite the Super Bowl.
For information on how to tune us in, go here.
In other news, I finished my Kandinsky-Schoenberg essay, then took a sixtysomething musician friend to the New York State Theater to see New York City Ballet dance an all-Balanchine program, Donizetti Variations, Apollo, and Serenade. He just discovered dance last month, and these were his very first Balanchine ballets. To say he was blown away would be a considerable understatement. In fact, he was reduced to near-blathering, which is no surprise. I’ve taken a lot of people to see their first Balanchine ballets, and they tend to blather all over the place afterward, the same way they do the first time they see Paul Taylor’s Esplanade or Mark Morris’ L’Allegro or Merce Cunningham’s Sounddance, three other great dances that have a way of overwhelming the novice viewer.
I particularly liked one thing my friend said about Serenade: “I kept wishing I could stop the action and point at all the beautiful things on stage, so that we could talk about them.” I know just how he feels. The first time you see a dance like Serenade, the events fly by so fast that you start to feel swamped by the dizzying onrush of beauty.
The good news is that NYCB dances Serenade a lot, as do most Balanchine companies. Like all the great Balanchine ballets, the more you see it, the more you see.