On 20 April a new choreography of Benjamin Britten’s Young Apollo by Robert North opens at the Theater Krefeld und Mönchengladbach for a run of 13 performances. The ballet evening, with the working title of Surprise, is a pasticcio of seven pieces that celebrates the theatre’s 75th anniversary, in which jubilation, lament, dream and memory merge into a symbol of life. It is designed by Udo Hesse and conducted by Giovanni Conti.
Young Apollo is inspired by the final lines of Keats’ unfinished poem Hyperion – named for the Titan sun god whose place Olympian Apollo took: ‘‘-and lo! From all / his limbs Celestial…’ It is inspired, Britten said, “by such sunshine as I’ve never seen before”, when staying in Toronto. Its music quivers with vitality, reinforced by gleaming open strings and shimmering harmonics, and rarely straying from a bright A major. Britten’s textural inventiveness is evident in the vivacious interplay between piano, concertante group of quartet soloists, and the larger string ensemble.
The work has previously received choreographic treatments from Adam Hougland in 2009 and Ashley Page in 2013. Houghland choreographed the work for the Manchester International Festival for a duet danced by Anaïs Chalendard and Junor de Oliveira Souza as part of an evening celebrating Carlos Acosta, Apollo and Other Works, which also appeared at Sadler’s Wells; Page staged the work at the Royal Ballet of Flanders and the Aldeburgh Festival, as part of If Memory Serves.
Page’s ballet, with beautiful boys dancing on the Venice Lido beach, recalls another scenic work from Britten in which the figure of Apollo is a radiant presence: his final opera Death in Venice (1973), after Thomas Mann’s novella, which was revived by the Stuttgarter Ballett and Staatsoper Stuttgart for six performances from 9 February 2025. Demis Volpi’s production and choreography was first created in 2017 and sees a Renaissance-inspired gold-painted dancer act as the spectacular onstage counterpart to the offstage countertenor’s Voice of Apollo.