by Daniel Hathaway

For their third Blossom collaboration under conductor Tito Muñoz, Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet and The Cleveland Orchestra brought four scores composed within the last hundred years to the pavilion stage at the Blossom Music Center on Saturday evening, August 17 (to be repeated on Sunday evening).

Two were newly-minted contributions to the dance repertoire. Stanton Welch choreographed John Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony (2007) in 2012 for Jacob’s Pillow — the original commission, entitled Joyride, involved Stanford University, Carnegie Hall, and the San Francisco Ballet, with choreography by Mark Morris. And Aram Khachaturian’s Adagio, a pas de deux from Spartacus (1954) was refashioned from the original ballet by Yuri Possokhov for the 2012 Napa Valley Festival de Sole.

Two were twentieth-century classics. Jerome Robbins’s 1945 Interplay was set to Morton Gould’s 1943 American Concertette. And Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps had its famous, riotous debut in Paris a hundred years ago last April. [Read more…]