new work for orchestra "Pas de deux"

My working title, “Evas and Adam’s dance fight at 288 beats per minute,” points to the central importance of pulse as the driving force of this intense, twelve-minute orchestral ballet, Pas de deux. Carried by an amplified double bass positioned at the center of the orchestral landscape, the omnipresent pulse of 288 bpm becomes the focal point of our rhythmic wandering across the dance floor. Pas de deux is an interplay of two forces: Adam and Eve, you and me, she and we—an ebb and flow, a swaying and turning, a pushing and pulling. The piece traces social interaction in its most fundamental—and at the same time most joyful—form: as dance, as it is celebrated in all cultures of the world. The audience is invited to join in dancing, or—like a dancer who briefly steps out of the celebration—to let their gaze wander: at times focusing on individual couples, at times widening out to the crowd, thus experiencing the event as a large-scale soundscape. I would compare the genesis of Pas de deux to a lizard’s tail growing back—except that here an entirely new body grows back onto the tail. In reference to the classic four-part ballet form of the same name—Entrée, Adagio, Variations, and Coda—our two protagonists, solo violin and solo cello, whirl through the first three sections. In the Coda, the body that has grown back onto the tail, they circle, romp, and reel, entangled in a dynamic struggle over positions and perspectives, ideas and dreams, until they finally draw the entire orchestra along with them. As a culminating point, I paraphrase the final scene of my opera Adam und Eva: a proclamation of individual freedom, responsibility, and creativity, with the mantra “love, beauty, serenity, novelty, mischief, and mirth”—a wild, unbridled dance. — Mike Svoboda, January 2026