DSO Master Series 3 - Ballet: Light, Grace and Beauty

Dust off your ballet pumps and prepare your plié for a celebration of music and movement.

By Anna Dowd

The Darwin Symphony Orchestra (DSO) bring to life ballet’s most beautiful musical moments with the third instalment of their Master Series, Ballet: Light, Grace and Beauty.

DSO Artistic Director and Chief Conductor Jonathon Tooby says the partnership between movement and music has evolved over thousands of years.

“One has always greatly enhanced the other. This can be said of the music of all the great classical ballet composers.”

Indeed, ballet is the gateway to some of the greatest and most recognised music in the classical canon.

Play Tchaikovsky’s ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies’ from The Nutcracker Suite at a party and you’ll be hard pressed to find a person who doesn’t recognise it.

“For me Tchaikovsky was the master of writing music to beautifully mimic human emotion and fantasy. It is without a question what Tchaikovsky’s intention was,” says Tooby.

“This is what you hear in his ballet music, which is why so many people relate to it and why his name is always tied to ballet.”

The party test applied to a score like ‘Dance of the Knights’ from the ballet Romeo and Juliet by fellow Russian composer Prokofiev should, likewise, produce the same results.

“Prokofiev totally captures the foreboding of the evils written into the story. It is distinctly disturbed and has a heaviness I think we have all related to at some time in our lives.”

For Tooby, programming a concert of dance music is a first and he says sifting through all the amazing material written for ballet has been a joy. But he’s particularly excited about the special guests joining the orchestra for Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, complete with sugar plum fairies.

“As an orchestra of and for the community, DSO is excited to be joined by our friends at Palmerston Ballet School to bring this joyous music to life.”

Sat 20 Oct | 7.30pm | Darwin Convention Centre | dso.org.au