Layering Franck's lyrical score with Mary Katrantzou's intricately embroidered lace lettered garments, Belles-Lettres is one of Peck’s most amorous ballets, replete with swooning pas de deux that build to an emotional climax.

With a cast of nine dancers, Belles-Lettres is NYCB Resident Choreographer and Artistic Advisor Justin Peck’s seventh ballet for the Company. Created for the 2014 Fall Gala, Belles-Lettres features costumes by London-based Greek fashion designer Mary Katrantzou and lighting by Mark Stanley. Set to César Franck’s Solo de piano avec accompagnement de quintette à cordes, the ballet marks the first time that Franck’s music has been included in the NYCB repertory.

Music:

Solo de piano avec accompagnement de quintette à cordes

Like a puzzle of shifting shapes and formations, Peck's first ballet for NYCB showcases his keen eye for manipulating bodies to form complex geometric structures and unique patterns. 

In Creases is the first work Justin Peck, a former soloist with New York City Ballet, created for the Company. The ballet is set to Philip Glass’ "Four Movements for Two Pianos," and received its world premiere in July 2012 during NYCB’s annual summer residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York. Peck has since created 18 works for NYCB, and was named the Company’s Resident Choreographer in 2014 and Artistic Advisor in 2019.

Music:

Four Movements for Two Pianos (First and Third Movements)

A sweeping romantic work for 55 dancers, the Austro-Hungarian-inflected Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet ends in an intoxicating finale.

Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25 (1861) marked a new development in chamber music. Though it received mixed reviews at the time of its premiere, it proved to be deeply influential for a number of 20th-century composers, laying the groundwork for atonality. Among the work’s admirers was Brahms’ great Viennese successor, Arnold Schoenberg, who in 1937 arranged the quartet for orchestra. In a letter to Dr. Alfred Frankenstein, the distinguished critic and musicologist of the San Francisco Chronicle, Schoenberg gives his reasons for this somewhat surprising undertaking: “1. I love the piece. 2. It is seldom played. 3. It is always very badly played, as the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and one hears nothing of the strings. I wanted for once to hear everything, and this I have achieved.” Balanchine often visited Stravinsky in Hollywood, and the composer would make suggestions of unfamiliar scores that might be suitable for ballet. In 1957, he played Balanchine a version of the Gounod Symphony, which the choreographer set the following year. In 1964, similarly, came the suggestion of Schoenberg’s orchestration of Brahms’ quartet, and Balanchine premiered the ballet in 1966, two years after NYCB’s move from City Center to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.

Music:

Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25 (1861), orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg (1937)