Vespro is a 2002 ballet made by Mauro Bigonzetti for New York City Ballet, set to a score of the same name by Bruno Moretti, and given its premiere as part of the company's Diamond Project V at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. It is the first of three works Bigonzetti and Moretti made together for City Ballet, followed by In Vento and Oltremare, and it belongs to a period in which the Diamond Project brought a wave of European and contemporary-leaning choreographers into a company built on the Balanchine repertory.
What is danced
The article gives only reviewers' impressions rather than a step-by-step account, but those impressions point to a piece built around live musicians as much as around the five dancers. Deborah Jowitt describes the male lead dancing and interacting directly with an on-stage piano, with the choreography's texture changing as further musicians and dancers join the stage picture. The New York Times review characterizes the vocabulary as producing 'startling supple shapes' from its dancers and musicians together, and frames the whole as 'witty neo-Futurist, neo-Dada and neo-Absurdist' — language that signals a contemporary-ballet approach working against, or alongside, classical shaping rather than a straight neoclassical or purely narrative idiom.
Context
The piece was made for the Diamond Project, New York City Ballet's initiative (begun in the 1990s) for commissioning new work, which by 2002 was bringing choreographers from outside the company's Balanchine-trained lineage — Bigonzetti among them — onto the New York State Theater stage. His pairing with composer Bruno Moretti for Vespro began a working relationship that continued through two further NYCB commissions, In Vento and Oltremare, situating this ballet as the opening statement of that collaboration rather than an isolated one-off.
Staging history
The article documents only the original 2002 premiere and cast, plus a follow-up New York Times review the next year describing the dancing as 'superb' and 'marvelous' and the work as 'a creative work' — implying at least one further run or repertory performance at NYCB, though no specific date, company, or revival is named.
How to watch it
Watch for the treatment of the on-stage piano as a partner rather than an accompanist — the male lead's interaction with it is singled out as the ballet's startling opening. Note how the choreography's density changes as musicians and dancers accumulate on stage, and look for the 'supple shapes' reviewers point to, which suggest a contemporary vocabulary stretching classical ballet line rather than a Balanchine-style neoclassical reading of it.
Credits
- composer: Bruno Moretti