By Coral Gables Gazette staff
For the entirety of its existence, the Miami City Ballet Orchestra has done its work in the dark — in the pit, beneath the stage, invisible to the audience while the dancers drew every eye above. Now that changes.
The orchestra makes its on-stage debut in Ballet Classics Under the Stars, a three-performance engagement at Sanctuary of the Arts in downtown Coral Gables on Friday, May 29 and Saturday, May 30 at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, May 31 at 4 p.m. Tickets are available at sanctuaryofthearts.org.
The premise is simple and the implications are considerable. A 34-piece ensemble — Maestro Gary Sheldon trimmed his full 50-member orchestra to fit the Sanctuary stage — will perform ballet’s most iconic compositions in a room where the audience sits directly against the performance space, with no pit, no barrier, and no distance between listener and musician. “You will feel like you’re part of the orchestra,” Sanctuary of the Arts founder Mike Eidson has said of the experience.
The orchestra and its history
The Miami City Ballet Orchestra has accompanied the company through its complete subscription season and all Nutcracker performances since the Opus One Orchestra began performing in the pit in 2007. The 2023-24 season marked the first under the orchestra’s current name. Principal conductors over the years have included Maestri Akiro Endo, Juan Francisco LaManna, and Gary Sheldon, whose tenure began in 2010.
Sheldon was the first recipient of the American Prize for Orchestral Conducting in 2010 and has held conducting positions with Atlanta Ballet, BalletMet, and San Francisco Ballet. He has led Miami City Ballet through premieres by some of the most significant choreographers working today and composed two ballet scores of his own. For this program, he brings a repertoire spanning roughly a century of ballet composition — Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Prokofiev, Barber, and Borodin — unified by what he describes as a strong ballet underpinning throughout.
The program
The evening’s lineup includes the polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, Bizet’s Carmen Fantasy, the balcony scene from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. The Polovetsian Dances from Borodin’s Prince Igor and Balanchine’s Serenade round out a program that moves from the grandeur of imperial Russian ballet through the lyricism of neoclassicism and the emotional intensity of mid-century American orchestral writing.
Two solo performances anchor the evening. Concertmaster and violinist Mei Mei Luo performs the Carmen Fantasy — a piece she noted feels especially fresh having just performed it with MCB dancers this season. Brazilian pianist Francisco Renno, the company’s pianist whose work in the pit has been noted by critics for years, performs Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in a rare featured appearance.
Dance is woven into the program rather than subordinated to it. Two Miami City Ballet dancers perform a pas de deux choreographed by Pontus Lidberg to music by Samuel Barber. Two dancers from the Sanctuary of the Arts Choreographic Ensemble perform the Romeo and Juliet pas de deux, with choreography by Rafi Maldonado-Lopez and Alice Arja.
The venue
Sanctuary of the Arts operates within an expansive arts campus at the First Church of Christ Scientist in Coral Gables, encompassing three historic designated properties that house two professional studios, a 314-seat concert hall, classrooms, and offices. Since its official opening in April 2022, the organization has established itself as one of South Florida’s most distinctive intimate performance spaces — one where the architecture and scale consistently amplify the relationship between performer and audience.
When the orchestra takes the stage, it will barely fit in the space — which is precisely the point. The intimacy that makes the Sanctuary an unusual venue for a chamber program makes it a revelatory one for an orchestra that has spent nearly two decades performing unseen. The musicians know this repertoire from the inside; hearing them play it in the open, at close range, with dancers moving among them, is a different experience entirely from anything the company’s regular season provides.
