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The KPAC Blog features classical music news, reviews, and analysis from South Texas and around the world.

Irina Baronova And The Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo

Wikimedia Commons

Drawing on letters, oral histories and interviews, Irina Baronova’s daughter, actress Victoria Tennant, warmly recounts her mother’s dramatic life, from her earliest aspirations, to her family’s flight from Russia, to her legendary performances in Paris. At the age of thirteen, Baronova became a star, chosen by the legendary George Balanchine to join the Ballets Russes, where she danced the lead in Swan Lake. In this talk, held at the McNay Art Museum on May 7, 2015, Tennant provides an intimate account of Baronova’s life as a dancer.

Tennant has written a book about her mother, Irina Baronova and the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo.

Built by artist and educator Marion Koogler McNay in the 1920s, the Spanish Colonial Revival residence opened as Texas's first museum of modern art in 1954. Today more than 100,000 visitors a year enjoy works by modern masters including Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, & Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In June 2008, the museum opened the 45,000-square-foot Jane and Arthur Stieren Center for Exhibitions designed by internationally renowned French architect Jean-Paul Viguier. Nearly doubling the McNay's exhibition space, the Stieren Center includes three separate outdoor sculpture galleries.