Boléro New York Performances

Maurice Ravel’s *Boléro* (1928) is built on a single, unchanging rhythmic pulse and a melody that returns again and again, passed through the orchestra as the sound steadily accumulates. Its cultural afterlife in New York is long, from early performances by the city’s major orchestras to its later adoption by ballet and film, where its slow escalation became shorthand for modern spectacle. Now at NJPAC, the New Jersey Symphony performs the score under Xian Zhang. The piece can read as an experiment in repetition that turns orchestration into narrative.