Texas Ballet Theater’s performances this weekend are all about memorializing the dead. The troupe previously performed Ben Stevenson’s Mozart Requiem in 2013 and its world premiere in 2007, as an all-male corps turns Mozart’s famous unfinished funeral mass into a tribute to soldiers who have fallen in the line of duty.
Those who were there for the troupe’s previous performances will know this work, but the main draw is the world premiere of Stevenson’s newest work, Martinu Pieces. Set to music by Bohuslav Martinu, the early 20th-century Czech composer, who may have been on the autism spectrum, twice fled for his life from Nazi invasions of Europe. Through it all, he never lost sight of his Czech roots in pastoral and folk song. His modernistic and brilliantly contrapuntal music – the soaring first movement of his Fifth Symphony, the starkly angst-ridden second movement of his Concerto Grosso, and his seldom-played but bubbly Overture for Orchestra – becomes the setting for Stevenson’s own memorial to those who lost their lives in the flooding in Houston last summer. If it’s as good a work as the one it’s sharing the bill with, we’re in for a special evening.
Texas Ballet Theater performs Fri-Sun at Bass Performance Hall, 555 Commerce St, FW. Tickets are $20-115. Call 877-828-9200.
