Celebrate Autumn with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

Les Grands Ballets presents

The Four Seasons

Les Grands Ballets carries on with its new cultural season from October 14 to 23 with the triple bill The Four Seasons. A show that consists of three great returns: the ballet of the same name by choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti to Vivaldi’s renowned Four Seasons along with that of Les Grands Ballets Orchestra, which will be performing that perpetual delight of a score. Also, Quebec choreographer Édouard Lock is back after an absence of more than 20 years from the Grands Ballets stage with a brand new piece for the company. And the Dutch-born Montrealer Gaby Baars will be joining it with his first longer-length creation for LGB, Rule 26 ½.

Recognized on international stages for a remarkable career in choreography spanning more than five decades, Édouard Lock had not created for Les Grands Ballets since the piece Étude in 1996. This time he presents an electrifying solo for a female dancer, the fruit of a choreographic reflection during the pandemic, created for principal dancer Rachele Buriassi. The choreographer will also show for the first time a short film created in collaboration with PHI Studio, which will be screened onstage during the show.

The Italian choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti, meanwhile, comes back to us with his luminous piece for 33 dancers, The Four Seasons, first presented in North America by Les Grands Ballets in 2007, then restaged in 2011. “I would like to let man’s inner seasons spring forth, his moods and his twists and turns, to give this impression of continuity over time, which is deeply rooted in us…. The four seasons are endlessly multiplied within man. Isn’t it in this that we see nature?

If Vivaldi is involved, then so must be the return of Les Grands Ballets Orchestra to the pit at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, with conductor Jean-Claude Picard on the podium to offer audiences an ultra-dynamic Four Seasons.

For this triptych, the emerging Montreal-based Dutch choreographer Gaby Baars, who last spring presented the pas de deux Dans ma main to music of the same name by Quebec pianist Jean-Michel Blais, returns to us with his first creation for Les Grands Ballets, Rule 26 ½. In it he approaches with a frank gaze the inevitable repetitions of everyday life, through which come together the impulses that we all share: desire, loneliness, love, abandonment. While all of us are carried away by the complexity of the everyday mundane, one thing remains: the intrinsic desire to unite, to love each other.

At Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier October 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23 at 8:00pm and October 23 at 2:00pm.