Serenade

The first ballet George Balanchine made in America, in 1934, Serenade is one of his most famous and cherished works. Seventeen girls form and reform in kaleidoscopic patterns. A girl enters, late. A boy joins her. After she falls to the ground, another boy approaches her, guided by a “Dark Angel,” then leaves her behind, to be carried off to a kind of transfiguration.

Endlessly suggestive though essentially plotless, Serenade is impelled forward by Tchaikovsky’s rushing, deeply affecting score.