Morgan Park Music Festival Presents Eglevsky Ballet

Sunday's installment of the Morgan Park Summer Music Festival will feature Eglevsky Ballet, the dance company on Long Island for the past half-century, whose performance of "The Nutcracker" is one of the most popular holiday season events at the Tilles Center for The Performing Arts in Brookville each year.

The backdrop of Hempstead Harbor will provide the setting this Sunday at 7:30 p.m. as Eglevsky Ballet presents "Keeping the Vision Alive," by Marina Eglevsky, the company's acting artistic director. 

The program will include such spirited classics of the ballet repertory as "Tarantella" and "Gaite Parisienne," starring Violeta Angelova and Momchil Mladenov, principal dancers of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet Company. 

The ballet company was founded in 1961 by Marina Eglevsky's Russian émigré father, Andre, premier danseur of George Balanchine's New York City Ballet, a performer "widely regarded as the greatest male classical dancer of his generation," according to no less a source than the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

Carrying on in the tradition of her father, Marina's credits include performances at Lincoln Center, the Royal Winnipeg and Hamburg Ballet Companies and renowned partners such as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev. In 1998, she staged Balanchine's "Sylvia Pas de Deux" for the Kennedy Center Honors during the presidency of Bill Clinton.