Birthday Offering
Sir Frederick Ashton
Premiered May 5, 1956, by Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet
Birthday Offering
This delightful ballet, as its title suggests, is very much a piéce d’occasion. It was created to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the company that was about to receive a royal charter and change its name from Sadler’s Wells Ballet to The Royal Ballet. Ashton intended a tribute to the company’s formidable founder, Dame Ninette de Valois, in the great Russian Imperial style of Marius Petipa, which de Valois had inherited through dancing with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and from which tradition she had nurtured the British Ballet.
Everything about Birthday Offering honors this intentional homage to the Russian Imperial Ballet. Ashton’s choice of Glazounov’s grandly lyrical and distinctively Russian music is matched by Levasseur’s elegant décor of drapes, glittering chandeliers and standing candelabra, reminiscent of some Imperial Russian palaces, and the dancers’ golden costumes. This is definitely the world of the splendid courts presented in Petipa’s ballets The Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake.
The ballet itself is a showpiece, essentially a series of virtuoso displays in the classical tradition – solos, duets and ensemble dances, celebrating the dancers’ different qualities. As the ballet opens, all seven couples make a majestic entrance onto the stage, confident, aristocratic and poised, as they sweep formally across the floor. Ashton then presents a series of solo variations, each one showing off the dancer’s individual style or distinctive qualities. These are followed by the male dancers, in a flamboyant, Polish mazurka, with its strongly emphasized three four rhythm.
At the heart of Birthday Offering lies the stylish pas de deux, originally created for Ashton’s muses, Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes, which is given tender expression by Glazounov’s ravishing cello solo. The ballet ends in a grand finale, danced by the entire company in a formal celebration.
Birthday Offering expresses the pride and admiration with which Ashton paid tribute to the extraordinary achievement of de Valois’ British Ballet Company in a short quarter-century, from the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells theatres, through a World War and triumphant American tour, to its 1956 status as the Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.