Cathy Marston isn’t wasting any time. Since her appointment, in 2023, as the head of Ballett Zürich, the British choreographer has already moved on to her second original full-length story ballet. Most contemporary choreographers have yet to complete their first, but this lost art—or relic of the 19th century, depending on your point of view—is a Marston specialty. It is not her storytelling, which is relatively conventional, that distinguishes her but her choice of morally vexatious subjects. For the first Zürich premiere, she took on Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement. The novelist was more moved—”anguished” was his word—by the ballet than he had been by his own work. (Marston’s Atonement has its American debut at the Joffrey, in Chicago, running from October 17 to 27.) For her second Zürich creation, she turns to Clara Schumann and the succession of triangulated relationships that shaped the famous pianist’s life: her divorced parents and she; her lover, Robert, her father, a piano teacher to them both, and she; Robert, the young Brahms, and she. —Apollinaire Scherr

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