Balanchine used Delibes’s music from Sylvia and La Source several times, first for Maria Tallchief, then for Melissa Hayden, but the indelible La Source for me, and the one reconstructed by Farrell, was done in 1968 with Violette Verdy and John Prinz. Big, plush Shannon Parsley (a former Boston Ballet corps member) had enough of Verdy’s feminine épaulement, her assertive footwork, to suggest the ballet’s French flavor, but no one else I ever saw had Verdy’s ballon and wit.
The Mozart Divertimento No. 15 reached its final form in 1956 headed by an all-star cast of five drastically different ballerinas. Just watching Farrell’s young dancers take on the challenging variations, duets, and lively ensemble work is an education in ballet’s tremendous expressive range, its headiest demands.
Related:
Crowning glory, Adam and Eve, More Jewels, More 
- Crowning glory
In 1967, George Balanchine created Jewels for New York City Ballet, and in short order this evening-length triptych — Emeralds , Rubies , and Diamonds — became the crown jewel of 20th-century dance.
- Adam and Eve
A day at New York City Ballet that starts with a matinee of Coppélia and ends with a Balanchine evening might seem to offer merely the contrast between classic and modern, old and new.
- More Jewels
Get your Jewels bearings
- Diaghilev days
The Ballets Russes come to town
- Long-lasting launch pad
Of the nearly 70 ballets that made up the repertory of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, only a few inhabit our stages today. But the Diaghilev adventure still inspires legions of choreographers, antiquarians, archivists, scholars, and gossips.
- Dancing ballet or not
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's Celebrity Series program at the Cutler Majestic last weekend could have been a primer of the ways not to dance ballet.
- Smaller is better
Next fall, Boston Ballet will move all its performing operations to the Opera House from Citi Performing Arts Center's immense and unfriendly Wang Theatre.
- Not so great
Way back in 1977, PBS gave us a Nutcracker with a difference: Mikhail Baryshnikov as an electrifying Nutcracker/Cavalier and willowy Gelsey Kirkland as an older-than-usual Clara, as the Sugar Plum Fairy.
- State of the art
Maybe it’s the economy, but Boston Ballet’s third-annual season-opening gala was a sober evening, without the orchestral overture that graced the first two affairs.
- Review: Ballerina
The subject of Bertrand Normand's 2006 French-television documentary is actually five ballerinas from the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg
- The real deal
Nineteenth-century ballets are not all alike. But Boston Ballet's Sleeping Beauty is the real McCoy.
- Less
Topics:
Dance
, Entertainment, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Dance, More
, Entertainment, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Dance, Performing Arts, Boston Ballet, Ballet, George Balanchine, New York City Ballet, Peter Martins, Shannon Parsley, Less
