A gala in memory of an extraordinary teacher
On Sunday 15 and Tuesday 17 May 2022, at 8 p.m., the Teatro alla Scala welcomes the students of the Ballet School and Orchestra of its Academy, under the direction of Pietro Mianiti, for a performance that puts them through their paces in the performance of choreographies from the great neoclassical repertoire and in new creations.
The performance is dedicated to the memory of Loreta Alexandrescu, a teacher at the Dance School, who died prematurely last February, to whom the Academy has decided to name the Dance Department scholarships, to which anyone can contribute, even with a small gesture, thanks to the new online section of the site dedicated to donations, as part of the first digital fundraising campaign ‘Aiutiamoli a sognare’.
Born in Romania, Loreta Alexandrescu soon embarked on a brilliant career as a professional dancer in her country. Having arrived in Italy at the end of the 1970s, she had immediately combined her artistic activity with teaching, for which she showed rare talents. She arrived at the Scala Ballet School in 1988 and trained generations of dancers who today, on the strength of her teaching, have become great performers on the world's most important stages.
The performance opens with the Presentation conceived by Frédéric Olivieri to the notes of Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto for two violins and orchestra in D minor. Solo violins, Ana Paloma Catherine Martin and Da Won Ghang, pupils of the same orchestra, who on several occasions have distinguished themselves as brilliant backing musicians.
The presentation allows us to demonstrate the different technical and interpretative levels reached by the students depending on the course they have attended among the eight in which they are trained.
For some of the youngest dancers, this is their absolute debut on stage. In particular, for the six Ukrainian girls - Polina, Aleksa, Daria, Olha, Mariia, Sofiia - whom the Academy has taken in since the outbreak of war, not only offering them the opportunity to attend the Ballet School free of charge, but also providing concrete support for their families: thanks to the contribution of the Community of Sant'Egidio and the Spazio Aperto Community Association, and thanks to a fund-raising campaign to which patrons and the Academy's own employees contributed, accommodation was found for them, they were placed in state schools and Italian language lessons were arranged for their families.
The show continues with two pieces entrusted to two Italian choreographers.
The first bears the signature of Matteo Levaggi, a dancer and choreographer of great experience, who has made the contamination of multiple artistic languages one of his stylistic features. It is one of his best-known creations, Largo, first staged in 2007 for the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris to music by Šostakóvič, for two performers of the calibre of Céline Cassone and Bruno Roy. Levaggi had conceived the piece by including a strong contemporary component, even though he had designed it for dancers with a strong classical background.
Today Levaggi has added a male figure, choosing another musical composition, Johann Sebastian Bach's Suite No. 1 in G major for solo cello, which will be performed on stage by Sofia Bellettini, a former student of the Course for Orchestra Professors.
The second creation is by Valentino Zucchetti, specially designed for the Ballet School. Canone Allegro engages on the first movement of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 64, fourteen dancers, eleven boys and three girls aged between 16 and 18, from 6th to 8th grade, in a succession of steps requiring great technical and expressive skills.
The now recognised talent of Giovanni Andrea Zanon, with whom the Academy has already collaborated in the past, is entrusted with the solo role in Mendelssohn's Concerto.
It closes with Serenade, one of George Balanchine's best-known ballets, to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, revived by Patricia Neary, who, after a brilliant career as a soloist with the New York City Ballet under Balanchine himself, took up his legacy, reviving his productions worldwide.
Serenade, which constitutes one of the highest examples of his style, sees 28 dancers in sky-blue costumes dancing in front of a backdrop of the same hue. As he himself wrote in Complete Stories of the Great Ballets: "For Serenade many people think there is a story hidden in the ballet. There isn't. It is simply dancers moving to a beautiful piece of music. The only story is the story of the music, a serenade, a dance, if you like, in the moonlight".
