La Scala Theatre Ballet Review
September 30, 2025 | Teatro alla Scala – Milan, Italy
Last week, La Scala Ballet presented a triptych that brought together three important pieces of twentieth-century repertory: Harald Lander’s Études to Czerny, Jiří Kylián’s Petite Mort to Mozart and Maurice Béjart’s Boléro to Ravel, conducted by Simon Hewett.
The evening featured étoile dancers Roberto Bolle and Nicoletta Manni alongside La Scala Ballet’s principal and corps dancers.
The program traced a deliberate arc, moving from classical technique to intimate modern expression to collective ritual.
Études opened with the rigor of classroom exercises, expanding into a full demonstration of classical vocabulary without narrative or ornament.
Petite Mort shifted the focus from discipline to intimacy, unveiling the eroticism usually stifled by restraint.
Boléro, with Bolle as the central figure, closed the evening with a demonstration of powerful sensuality, using ritualistic movement to compound an adoration of the human body.
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La Scala Theatre Ballet Review
Études, created in Copenhagen in 1948 and later revised for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1952, transforms the structure of a daily ballet class into spectacle. At La Scala, the opening blackout and spotlight isolated the dancers’ feet, recalling the original staging in which a curtain hid the upper body and directed attention to the mechanics of movement.
Later, the audience saw more lighting play as the corps danced as dark silhouettes against a blue backdrop, their leg lines rendered in graphic clarity.
The scenes then moved from barre to center, where Manni showed undaunted precision dancing alongside Timofej Andrijashenko, Navrin Turnbull and Marco Agostino.
But where performance usually allows dancers to emphasize strengths, Études functions more like class, exposing the entire spectrum of skill or imperfection.
Andrijashenko faltered in his turns but recovered in the grand allegro with amplitude and force. The male corps fell briefly out of sync yet produced some of the evening’s strongest images when crossing the stage one by one in brisé volé.
Études unveiled itself as a study in exposure rather than performance. It placed the dancers under the same scrutiny as class, demanding full range without narrative cover.
The evening then moved to Petite Mort, where the dancers were made to shift from physical to emotive vulnerability.
Created in 1991 for the Salzburg Festival on the bicentenary of Mozart’s death, Petite Mort is set to the slow movements of Piano Concertos No. 23 and 21. The ballet alternates between group formations, pas de deux and the manipulation of six fencing foils, suggestive of sexual undertones and functioning both as props and independent partners.
Critics such as Charles Ford argue that Mozart’s compositions often encode erotic tension and aggression beneath formal balance and restraint.
Petite Mort seems to showcase that eroticism, translating it through imagery that makes the body both unguarded and exposed. The men held planks with arched backs, suspending strength at the edge of collapse. Couples slithered on the floor off the stage after a sensual pas de deux, denoting a sense of abashedness. A later scene involved black dress props, with women entering and exiting them fluidly, again mirroring this idea of eroticism dressed in formality.
The men held planks with arched backs, suspending strength at the edge of collapse.
Couples slithered on the floor off the stage after a sensual pas de deux, denoting a sense of abashedness.
A later scene involved black dress props, with women entering and exiting them fluidly, again mirroring this idea of eroticism dressed in formality.
Agnese Di Clemente kept the audience’s attention on her, as her execution and emotive performance were unmatched in both her pas de deux and in the scene with the black dress props.
Kylián described Petite Mort as “a poetic way to describe sexual ecstasy,” and positioned between Études and Boléro, it provided contrast by turning attention from technical display to emotional release.
Boléro itself drew upon themes from the two preceding ballets: restraint, building of passion, desire, discipline.
Boléro, created in 1961 in Brussels, is one of the most recognizable works in the modern ballet repertory. It is set to Ravel’s score, described in the program as
“a ritual of powerful sensuality and driving intensity in which Béjart entrusts the central role (the Melody) indifferently to a male or female dancer, while the Rhythm is interpreted by a group of dancers.”
In a ballet of sixteen minutes built on repetition and isolated gesture, not much can go poorly.
Boléro functions as an adoration of the human body and as a direct embodiment of the music. At La Scala the Melody was danced by Bolle, whose entrance drew audible “ooos” and “ahhs” from the audience. He remained at the center, encircled by the male ensemble whose sustained focus gave the performance an atmosphere of reverence.
As the music crescendoed, the ensemble shifted from stillness to continuous rhythm, and the ballet concluded as a collective ritual. It brought the evening to an end through persistence, as the repetition of sound and gesture merged into a single pulse.
Taken together, the three works formed a coherent journey rather than a simple triptych.
Études exposed technique in its most uncompromising form, demanding precision at every level. Petite Mort unveiled the eroticism that Mozart’s music often encodes beneath restraint, its images of weapons, dresses and movement breaking the tension between formality and desire. Boléro concluded as Béjart conceived it, a ritual of powerful sensuality and intensifying rhythm, an adoration of the ballet body.
For the dancers the program was surely a pleasure, testing every aspect of classical discipline while offering the space to surrender to music.
Featured Photo of La Scala Theatre Ballet‘s Nicoletta Manni and Timofej Andrijashenko in Jiří Kylián’s Petit Mort. Photo by Brescia e Amisano © Teatro alla Scala.
