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New Mexico Ballet Company, New Mexico Philharmonic team up for new ‘Great Gatsby’ ballet at Popejoy
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In honor of the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” the New Mexico Ballet Company and the New Mexico Philharmonic have teamed up to produce a new adaptation of the novel featuring an original ballet score by New Mexico composer Colin Martin.
“The Great Gatsby” captures the social upheavals of the Roaring Twenties with music that shifts between classical and jazz, and will premiere on Saturday, April 19, at Popejoy Hall.
“I listened to a lot of the really great ballet music of the past — Russian ballet, especially — and tried to take some of that influence, blended through my own style, but I also incorporated some of the 1920s Jazz Age idiom,” Martin said.
In addition to Martin’s score, the production includes pieces by Russian Romantic composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and American jazz composer George Gershwin, whose diametrically opposed musical approaches Martin brings together.
His mélange of styles is, at times, deliberately disruptive, reflecting the anxieties and enthusiasms of Fitzgerald’s characters amid the turbulence of their lives.
“There are a lot of off-kilter, shifting rhythms that frankly made it hard to dance to and hard to play for the orchestra, but I think that gave the music a lot more character,” Martin said.
NMBC’s artistic director Kelly Ruggiero, who choreographed the ballet, called Martin’s orchestration “beautiful.”
“This artistic partnership brings the magic and intrigue of this classic tale to the stage,” Ruggiero said.
NMPhil, New Mexico’s largest professional classical symphony orchestra, is led by the award-winning conductor Roberto Minczuk, who brings Martin’s score to life.
While the music and dancing allows audiences to daydream about late-night Champagne parties on Long Island, the production doesn’t ignore Fitzgerald’s darker themes.
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“People think of all the Jazz Age glitz and glamour kind of stuff, but there’s so much depth and so much commentary about the American dream and different social classes and the worship of money,” Martin said.
“It’s definitely a tragedy,” he added. “And my music plays that up, especially at the end of the story.”
The last paragraph of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” is one of the most memorable in literary history, with its potent image of a green light at the end of a dock symbolizing an endlessly tantalizing, unobtainable dream.
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us,” Fitzgerald wrote. “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther … So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Ruggiero’s and Martin’s new ballet adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” allows elegance and opulence to comingle with tragedy, as they do in the novel, seducing viewers with a new vision of unobtainable beauty.
