Jerome Robbins’ Comedic Take on Chopin

This morning, somewhat by accident, I realized that, after having taken a deep dive into the ballet repertoire between April and July, there were still a few favorite ballets that I had not yet discussed. Discovering a YouTube video of a performance by the Paris Opera Ballet of Jerome Robbins’ “The Concert” revived any latent interest. Robbins created this ballet for the New York City Ballet, which first performed it on March 6, 1956; and the Paris Opera Ballet is one of many companies (including the San Francisco Ballet) that has added it to repertoire.

Unless I am mistaken, “The Concert” was my “first contact” with humor in a ballet. Around the time it was first performed (when I was about ten years old), one of those Sunday morning television “culture” programs (I think it was called Camera Three) presented a few excerpts. Those moments fade in and out of memory, but watching the ballet in its entirety this morning was a refreshing experience.

Sadly, the Wikipedia page for this ballet is sparser than it should be. It does list all the selected compositions by Frédéric Chopin that constitute the score. However, it fails to mention that some, but not all, of those selections are performed by an on-stage pianist; and the rest of the score consists of orchestral arrangements of Chopin by Hershy Key (last cited on this site when I wrote about George Balanchine’s ballet based on songs by George Gershwin, “Who Cares?”). It also cites the decor by Saul Steinberg (a name unfamiliar to me at the age of ten before my first encounter with The New Yorker). Finally, the sentence before the cast listings is the following:

Robbins made three subsequent ballets to Chopin's music: Dances at a Gathering (1969), In the Night (1970), and Other Dances (1976), made for Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova.

None of these ballets provide the rolling-on-the-floor humor served up by “The Concert.”

The gags actually begin before the first dancer appears. The onstage piano is played by a well-trained pianist; but Robbins requires that pianist to go through a seemly endless ritual of preparation. This includes raising an enormous cloud of dust over the upper third of the keyboard. There is a good chance that Robbins was familiar with the antics of the Danish pianist Victor Borge and may have used some of the antics of that “Clown Prince of Denmark” for his own devices.

screen shot from the video being discussed

The choreography itself is rich in sight gags. Some of these simply show the humor of human foibles, such as the audience behavior during the first piano selection. Others involve elaborate tangles of dancers (the sort Robbins would have observed in Balanchine ballets) in which individual dancers fall out of position or out of sync. The only hazard with watching this ballet is that, if you laugh too hard at one comedic turn, you may be too distracted to catch the next one. Fortunately, one can compensate for this difficulty on a YouTube platform.