New York City Ballet’s 2024-25 season will feature earlier curtain times, fewer intermissions and a tribute to the great American ballerina Maria Tallchief, the company announced on Monday.
Starting in the fall, in response to audience feedback and what Wendy Whelan, City Ballet’s associate artistic director, called “new ways of life” following the pandemic, curtain times will be pushed up, with all evening performances beginning at 7:30 p.m. (Matinees will remain at 2 p.m. on Saturdays and 3 p.m. on Sundays.) In addition, about 40 percent of the season’s repertory performances will include only one intermission, down from the standard two.
“Slightly shorter performances without an intermission makes everybody happy — dancers, audience members, everybody,” Jonathan Stafford, City Ballet’s artistic director, said. “You’re still getting the same quality of performance but in a slightly shorter time frame.”
The lineup will feature 30 ballets by the company’s co-founder, George Balanchine, including, in the winter, a revival of his final work, “Variations for Orchestra” (1982); seven works by Jerome Robbins; and three world premieres.
The new works will be by Caili Quan (Oct. 9), set to Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1; by City Ballet’s resident choreographer Justin Peck (Jan. 29), to an original score by Dan Deacon; and by Alexei Ratmansky (Feb. 6), the company’s artist in residence. He will stage a suite of dances from Petipa’s full-length “Paquita” that incorporates the “Minkus Pas de Trois,” Balanchine’s restaging of the ballet’s pas de trois.
Whelan said audiences will get “a feel for the spectrum of what we do here and what we’re capable of.”
“It’s a very wide range of work,” she said.
The season opens on Sept. 17 with a program of works by Balanchine and Robbins: “Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2,” “Duo Concertant” and “Glass Pieces.”
And the company will celebrate many anniversaries: Justin Peck’s 10th as resident choreographer, with an all-Peck program beginning on Sept. 24; the 50th anniversary of Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova’s “Coppélia,” with seven performances starting on Sept. 27; the 90th anniversary of the founding of the company-affiliated School of American Ballet with a program on Oct. 1; and a tribute, in her centennial year, to Maria Tallchief with a program of three Balanchine ballets created for her: “Scotch Symphony,” “Sylvia Pas de Deux” and “Firebird.”
The commemoration of the School of American Ballet — founded in 1934, more than a decade before City Ballet — will feature Balanchine’s “Serenade,” the first work created for the school’s students and the first ballet Balanchine made in the United States; and “Mozartiana,” one of his last works, which features students from the school’s children’s division.
The season will also include the return of Tiler Peck’s “Concerto for Two Pianos” (Oct. 9); the stage premiere of Kyle Abraham’s “When We Fell” (May 16), which debuted on film during the pandemic shutdown; and company premieres of Lar Lubovitch’s “Each in His Own Time” (Sept. 19) and Gianna Reisen’s “Signs” (Oct. 9).
“It’s a really impressive list of new ballets that you just don’t really see anywhere else,” Stafford said. “It’s an embarrassment of riches sometimes with the new works and the voices we get to uplift each year.”
A full lineup can be found at nycballet.com.
