Compañía Nacional de Danza

Serenade was created in 1934 to the music of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C Major although the third and fourth movements of Tchaikovsky's score are rearranged. It was the first ballet that Balanchine created in North America and he did it for the School of American Ballet and it constitutes a truly significant example of the very personal style of the Russian-American creator.
There is no plot, in Balanchine's own words "the ballet tells its story in a musical and choreographic way, without resorting to any other narration." Perhaps, as far as meaning is concerned, it could point to a thought by Balanchine: “every man goes with destiny behind him; "He finds a woman, he loves her, but destiny already has other plans."
Serenade expresses the rhythm, dynamism and tonalities of music. An elementary set in blue tones serves as a framework for the rhythmic, precise and only apparently narrative movements of the five soloists and twenty dancers of the corps de ballet that Balanchine puts on stage. Their encounters and disagreements, their interaction, crossed or symmetrical, make up a successive and uninterrupted series of scenes in which a pure romanticism is perceived, very subtle and fully in line with the neoclassical character of Balanchine's style.
It is the first choreography that Patricia Neary, considered a “typical dancer” of Balanchine, performed in Spain.