Firebird New York Performances

Igor Stravinsky’s *The Firebird* (1910) is a ballet drawn from Russian folklore, where a radiant, dangerous creature brings both rescue and ruin to those who try to possess it. Written for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, it helped shift early 20th‑century ballet toward a modern musical language and opened the path to Stravinsky’s later stage works. At David Geffen Hall, American Ballet Theatre joins Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic Chorus in a program that also includes music by Ellen Reid. Its score still reads as a hinge point: narrative dance meeting orchestral color with a new, sharper edge.