Agon (ballet)


Agon is a 22-minute neoclassical ballet for twelve dancers with music by Igor Stravinsky. Its first choreographer was George Balanchine. Stravinsky began composition in December 1953 but was interrupted the next year; he resumed work in 1956 and concluded on April 27, 1957. The music was first performed on June 17, 1957, in Los Angeles conducted by Robert Craft, while the first stage performance was given by the New York City Ballet on December 1, 1957, at the City Center of Music and Drama, New York. Between those dates the Südwestfunk in Germany made the work's first studio recording; the Sinfonieorchester des Südwestfunks Baden-Baden, as it was then called, was led by Hans Rosbaud. This was released on the Wergo label seven years later and remains in the catalog, for sale online from Amazon.de.
The composition's long gestation period covers an interesting juncture in Stravinsky's composing career, in which he moved from a diatonic musical idiom to one based on twelve-tone technique; the music of the ballet thus demonstrates a unique symbiosis of musical idioms. The ballet has no story, but consists of a series of dance movements in which various groups of dancers interact in pairs, trios, quartets, etc. A number of the movements are based on 17th-century French court dances – saraband, galliard and bransle. It was danced as part of City Ballet's 1982 Stravinsky Centennial Celebration.

Form

Stravinsky laid out the ballet in a duodecimal form, with four large sections each consisting of three dances. A Prelude and two Interludes occur between the large sections, but this does not fundamentally affect the twelve-part design because their function is caesural and compensatory :
  1. Pas-de-quatre
  2. Double pas-de-quatre
  3. Triple pas-de-quatre
  1. Sarabande-step
  2. Gaillarde
  3. Coda
  1. Bransle simple
  2. Bransle gay
  3. Bransle double
  1. Pas-de-deux
  2. Four Duos
  3. Four Trios

    Instrumentation

Agon is scored for a large orchestra consisting of piccolo, 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, harp, piano, mandolin, timpani, tom-tom, xylophone, castanets, and strings. At no point does the entire orchestra play a tutti. Each section is scored for a different combination of instruments.

Music

This was not the first composition in which Stravinsky employed serial techniques, but it was the first in which he used a twelve-tone row, introduced in the second coda, at bar 185. Earlier in the work, Stravinsky had employed a seventeen-tone row, in bars 104–107, and evidence from the sketches suggests a close relationship between these two rows. The Bransle Double is based on a different twelve-tone series, the hexachords of which are treated independently. Those hexachords first appear separately in the Bransle Simple and Bransle Gay, and are then combined to form a twelve-tone row in the Bransle Double. These three dances together constitute the second pas-de-trois.

Casts

Original

2008 Winter tour

2008 Summer tour to Copenhagen

2009 Fall tour to [Bunkamura] in Tokyo

First cast

2012 Fall

First cast
Second cast

Italy

When Agon was performed in Italy in 1965, Stravinsky was particularly pleased with the performance of mandolinist Giuseppe Anedda: