Valsinhas

Ricardo Graziano started dancing when he was eight years old in his hometown of Mogi das Cruzes, Brazil. At the age of 16, he won a scholarship to study at the Academie des Tanzes in Mannheim, Germany, and in 2005 joined Tulsa Ballet.

In 2010, Graziano joined The Sarasota Ballet as a Soloist, the following year was promoted to Principal. It was at the start of the 2011 – 2012 Season that Graziano was given the opportunity by Iain Webb to choreograph his first ballet, Shostakovich Suite, which premiered in October 2011. Following this ballet, Graziano choreographed four new ballets before being appointed Resident Choreographer by Iain Webb in 2014 after a performance of Symphony of Sorrows. Since then, he has choreographed several more works for the Company, including In a State of Weightlessness, which premiered August 12, 2015, as a part of The Sarasota Ballet’s first week-long residency at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

His other choreographic works for The Sarasota Ballet include: Pomp and Circumstance for The Sarasota Ballet’s March 2013 Gala; Valsinhas in May 2013; Before Night Falls in February 2014; En las Calles de Murcia in March 2015; Sonata in Four Movements in August 2016 at the 1932 Criterion Theatre in Bar Harbor, Maine; The Jolly Overture and Somewhere for The Sarasota Ballet’s April 2018 Gala; Amorosa in January 2019, Sonatina in October 2021, and The Pilgrimage in October 2022.

In total, Graziano will have choreographed 11 one-act ballets and three divertissements by the end of the 2023 – 2024 Season.

Franz Schubert was a prolific composer, writing some 600 lieder and nine symphonies, although he died at the age of 31. Aged 10, the young Schubert won a place in the Vienna Imperial Court chapel choir and quickly gained a reputation as a budding composer with a set of facile string quartets. After leaving school, Schubert briefly followed his father into the teaching profession, composing his first indisputable masterpiece, Gretchen am Spinnrade, at 17. While Schubert was still struggling to hold down a full-time teaching post, he composed 145 lieder (songs), the Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies, two sonatas, and a series of shorter works for solo piano, two mass settings and other shorter choral works, four stage works, and a string quartet, in addition to various other projects. This period of intense creative activity remains one of the most inexplicable feats of productivity in musical history.

With little money and nothing much more than his “groupies” to support him, Schubert began to produce a seemingly endless stream of masterpieces that, for the most part, were left to posterity to discover, including the two great song cycles, Die Schöne Mullerin and Winterreise, the Eighth (“Unfinished”) and Ninth (“Great”) Symphonies, the Octet for Wind, the last three string quartets, the two piano trios, the String Quintet, the “Wanderer” Fantasy, and the last six sonatas for solo piano.