The three choreographers of the second ballet evening this season prove their extraordinarily sensitive handling of music. For the first time, Zurich Ballet will be working with Martin Schläpfer. Having reformed the Ballett am Rhein in Dusseldorf/Duisburg, the Swiss choreographer has directed one of Germany’s largest companies, which has long also been internationally celebrated, since 2009. Schläpfer’s innovative, technically highly demanding, neoclassically oriented body language tells stories about being human. His pared-down style is abstract, at most episodic. His Forellenquintett (Trout Quintet, 2O1O) to the famous music by Franz Schubert is a ballet full of serene poetry and romanticism, but which also always takes into consideration the depths of the human psyche.

Douglas Lee, who after successful years as a dancer in the Stuttgart Ballet has launched a promising international career as a choreographer, will be a guest at Zurich Opera for the second time. His creations are impressive for their sophisticated body language, mysteriously intertwined pas de deux and masterful exaggeration of the neoclassical vocabulary.

The choreographer Jiří Kylián from Prague made a decisive contribution to the development of the Nederlands Dans Theater. In his ballet of 1997, Wings of Wax, the world seems to have been turned upside down. The wings of wax refer to Icarus, who flew too close to the sun on his homemade wings and fell into the sea. The musical collage of compositions by Biber, Bach, Cage and Glass combines baroque, modernist and minimal music in an astonishingly homogeneous landscape of sound that offers the foundation for an enchanting variety of dance forms.