Compañía Nacional de Danza

Serenade was the first ballet Balanchine created in North America. He wrote it for the School of American Ballet. Set to the music of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C major, although the third and fourth movements of the score are out of order, it is a significant example of the Russian-American creator's highly personal style.
There is no plot; in Balanchine's own words, "the ballet tells its story musically and choreographically, without resorting to any external narration.” Perhaps, in terms of meaning, it could point to a thought of Balanchine's: "Every man walks with destiny at his back; he meets a woman, he loves her, but destiny already has other plans."
Serenade expresses the rhythm, dynamism, and tonalities of the music.
A simple blue-toned set frames the rhythmic, precise, and seemingly narrative movements of the five soloists and twenty corps de ballet dancers that Balanchine stages. Their encounters and disagreements, their interaction, whether crossed or symmetrical, compose a successive and uninterrupted series of scenes in which one perceives a pure romanticism, very subtle and fully in keeping with the neoclassical character of the Balanchine style.
This is the first choreography that Patricia Neary, considered a "typical dancer" of Balanchine, staged in Spain.