Performer: Boston Ballet Orchestra

Boston Ballet ends its 2014-2015 season with Thrill of Contact, a truly thrilling program of four works that showcase a wide spectrum of styles.

Based on Alexandre Dumas' La Dame aux Camélias the tragic love story that inspired Verdi's  La Traviata, Ashton Marguerite and Armand ballet for the Royal Ballet, as well as the 2001 film Moulin Rouge, Val Caniparoli's Lady of the Camellias, danced here by Boston Ballet is a beautifully orchestrated, and heartbreaking production.

Mikko Nissinen's new production of Swan Lake for Boston Ballet is a victory, both in showcasing the company’s pool of talent and in rising to modern audience desires to be awed by the sublime.

Boston Ballet's second program at Lincoln Center's David H Koch Theater showed off the company's terrific speed, musicality and versatility. 

Boston Ballet's triple bill Pricked, demonstrates the company's versatility both technically and expressively, while showcasing ballet’s traditional past in Études and its more recent incarnations in D.M.J. 1953-1977 and Cacti. 

If you "don't get” ballet, you may be thinking too hard. In the words of one friend who went to see Boston Ballet's Balanchine/Robbins program with me on opening night, “you look past it and it appears.” While many ballets tell a story or convey a theme, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins encourage us to appreciate beauty for the sake of beauty. We don't try to understand a moonrise, after all.