Diana Vishneva and Marcelo Gomes in "Onegin." (Courtesy ABT)

ABT has completed the first half of its spring season at the Met. We’ve had the Giselles (and their sister Wilis), Bayadére’s Nikiyas (and their sister Shades). We’ve been lucky enough to have the population of the Bright Stream collective farm and the visiting artists who come to cheer them up—though they’re pretty cheerful already. And we’ve had a brand new production of John Cranko’s Onegin. Did we need it? Did we need Onegin at all? No, but ABT needed it. How can the company fill the huge Met without the full-evening costume dramas that keep the tourists coming?

It was in 1965 that Cranko created Onegin for the Stuttgart Ballet and its highly regarded (though not by me) dramatic star Marcia Haydée, and it was in 2001 that ABT took it on. Ballerinas like to dance its heroine, Tatiana, and why not? She loves, she suffers, she has her revenge on the man who spurned her when she was a shy and sensitive girl, and she gets to glitter as Queen of the Ballroom after she marries the rich, older general who’s at the heart of Petersburg society. What she doesn’t get to do is any interesting dancing, but you can’t have everything. It’s waltz, waltz, waltz in the group scenes and lifts, lifts, lifts in the duets. The characterization comes from the emoting, not the steps.

For Russians, to whom Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin is sacred text, the ballet’s story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, Romeo and Hamlet, are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante. We Westerners who don’t speak Russian know it best from Tchaikovsky’s glorious opera. (One of the peculiarities of Cranko’s effort is that although he uses Tchaikovsky music, it’s not music from the opera.) For us, Onegin isn’t part of the cultural consciousness; it’s just another story line.

Star performances can partly redeem it, and ABT is star-studded again, thanks to its recent influx of superb ballerinas from Eastern Europe. The Kirov’s Diana Vishneva, a paragon of strength, beauty and dramatic power, was the first-cast Tatiana—it’s a natural role for her. To cast the wonderful Natalia Osipova, now a major attraction here, as Olga was luxury casting; this isn’t a role that demands her exceptional speed and brilliance. Perhaps the most gratifying performance of all came from ABT’s own Marcelo Gomes as Onegin, that callow Byronic figure whose careless pride leads to the fatal duel that destroys three lives, including his own. Gomes is handsome, impudent, haughty yet sympathetic—a riveting figure with nothing riveting to dance. Does it matter? He’s as real a star as his colleague David Hallberg, and as appealing a personality.

The new production is by the estimable Santo Loquasto. It doesn’t help, it doesn’t hurt; it’s pretty, conventional, unexciting, like the ballet itself. No treatment of the décor could turn Cranko’s Onegin into a classic. And yet for all its vacuity as a dance event, Onegin has the virtues of lucidity and cohesion. It’s certainly an improvement over such recent other ABT attempts as The Lady of the Camellias.

Osipova’s Giselle was the same girl she first stunned us with several years ago—amazingly buoyant and secure. Her dancing is faultless, her interpretation more open to question. For me, her mad scene and death lack the ultimate pathos we’ve seen in Ulanova, Fonteyn, Makarova and others, including that other current European wonder, Alina Cojocaru. Osipova at the end of Act One leaves me grateful for her ability, not wounded to the heart. Hallberg, her Albrecht, is consistently thrilling. Those legs, that stretch, that grandeur, that radiance. A few mannerisms are creeping in—no doubt picked up at the Bolshoi, for whom he now also dances. The head is flung back just a little too melodramatically as he exits, flying; too much is made of the cape; even the famous hair looks a touch Sovietized. But he’s America’s finest homegrown danseur noble, and he’s entitled.

And then we see him in Ratmansky’s Bright Stream, in full Les Sylphides drag—good-natured, enjoying the joke, part of the fun. And (a quality he shares with Gomes) essentially modest. Bright Stream, with its nonstop energy and endless invention—the big black dog on the bicycle, the human tractor—delights the audience, although the house isn’t as full as it should be: no swans, no Wilis, no Shades. Just about everyone looks terrific in it, maybe because just about everyone, including the happily deployed corps, has something meaningful to do. And, maybe because it’s a ballet about a community, ABT looks like a community when dancing it. Its one weakness is the underdeveloped lead female role; Zina has lots to do, but a good deal of it is generic—we never really know who she is. Even so, Paloma Herrera brings some life to her. Sadly, Julie Kent is too wan, her technique too eroded, to do the same, nor should a woman of her years have to lie on her tummy on the ground, friskily kicking up her heels.

As for the sillinesses of Bayadère, they fade in the light of the great “Kingdom of the Shades” act. ABT’s corps descends the ramp with precision and dignity; the genius of Petipa has supplied the rest. Yes, we have to survive the Orientalia—the Rajah, the High Priest, the stuffed tiger, the ecstatic fakirs, the Bronze Idol, the fatal snake buried in the posy of flowers, the swaying harem-y dancers—but it’s all worth it for the Shades. And some of the nonsense can be fun.

Nikiya is one of the touchstone roles in classical ballet, and perfect for Cojocaru—tender, delicate, passionate, true. She and her superb partner, Herman Cornejo, convince us of their ardor and their doleful fate. Another new Russian import, Polina Semionova, seems twice Cojocaru’s size and was half as effective. The production, by Makarova, is handsome and coherent, but Bayadére is heavy, heavy, and long, long.

City Ballet wound up its spring season with a one-week run of Balanchine’s sublime A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Who can resist it? Shakespeare’s vision is irresistible, Mendelssohn’s music is irresistible. And Balanchine’s genius for narrative is beyond praise. The fluttering fairies and butterflies and bugs, the angry, disputatious Titania and Oberon, the endearing Puck, the two mixed-up sets of lovers, the wooing King Theseus (of Athens) and Hippolyta (Queen of the Amazons), Bottom and his rowdy artisan gang—they stride and scamper over the stage with absolutely clarity and perfect timing; there’s not a moment of confusion or blur.

Dream is now 50 years old. Happy golden anniversary!

This year some of the casting, at least of the two performances I saw, was questionable. Maria Kowroski is at her most gorgeous as Titania. She’s both soft and commanding, delicate and imperious, girlish and grand, innocent and sensual. Alas, Teresa Reichlen is short on these qualities. She’s an astonishing physical specimen, almost extraterrestrial—extremely tall with a small head and thin gangly arms. She has remarkable technique, but it’s dissipated as, flinging her limbs around, apparently uncentered, she unleashes a series of startling separate effects that don’t add up to a convincing character or a convincing style of classical dancing. Her one great role is as the big girl in “Rubies”; in ballets like Concerto Barocco and Dream she’s like Alice after drinking from the bottle she finds at the bottom of the rabbit hole.

Another of Peter Martins’s current favorites is pint-size Megan Fairchild. Unsuited as she was to the first movement of Symphony in C and the “Theme and Variations” section of Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3, she was even less satisfactory in the exquisite and subtle pas de deux that Balanchine created for Violette Verdy in the second act of Dream. Fairchild was nervous, and she faltered, but that’s not the basic problem; she’ll improve. What’s unfixable is that she will never be a paradigm of classicism, and she’s being given the big classical roles for which she doesn’t have the power, the amplitude or, for that matter, the essential articulation in her feet. We’re getting a replay of the Yvonne Borrée story. (On the other hand, she has real comic talent; she was the best thing going in the current revival of Susan Stroman’s Double Feature, a Broadway show masquerading as a ballet. Stroman has musical-comedy smarts, but she has no ballet vocabulary.)

At one Dream performance we had the tallest Butterfly (Brittany Pollack) and the shortest Hippolyta (Ana Sophia Scheller) I’ve ever seen. It was cuckoo. When Savannah Lowery thundered on as the Amazon Queen things were restored to normal: Get out of her way! There were charming performances from Taylor Stanley as Bottom and Chase Finlay as Lysander. from Rebecca Krohn and Sterling Hyltin as Helena and Hermia. The single finest performance of the season, not surprisingly, came from Tiler Peck in the Dream pas de deux—she’s so musically intelligent, so secure, so effortless, so fluent that the Fairchild version vanished like a … dream. But Peck has been these things in every role this season.

Dream is so rich that each time you see it you fall in love with something you hadn’t focused on before. This year, for me, the most moving moment lasted less than a dozen seconds. Bottom has served his purpose as the donkey, and when his worried pals come looking for him, there he is, restored, the donkey’s head vanished. Bottom’s himself again, and the five men hug and prance offstage, the goodness and health of their humanity revealed in a flash. Yes, Balanchine (and Shakespeare and Mendelssohn) are telling us what fools these mortals be. But they also know what mortals these fools be.

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Balanchine's "Liebeslieder Walzer." (Courtesy Paul Kolnik/City Ballet)

New York City Ballet’s spring gala came and went, as galas will do, and left behind two unnecessary new ballets plus new costumes for Symphony in C, that Balanchine masterpiece to Bizet, that has been absent from the repertory for four years or so, God knows why. It’s true that the Karinska costumes, which some of us have been looking at lovingly for a lifetime, had come to seem a little dowdy; why not freshen them up? The job has been done by Marc Heppel, the company’s director of costumes, and though the result is a touch heavy—trying just a little too hard for a fashion look, with a sprinkling of tiny crystals (a nod to the ballet’s original title, Le Palais de Cristal) and an over-determined cleavage—they’ll serve.

Unfortunately, the performance itself was under-determined. The first movement ballerina should be a paradigm of strength and authority. Why give such a role to Megan Fairchild, essentially a soubrette, whose twinkle-toes agility lacks command and power? Colleagues tell me that she was stronger at her second performance, and she’s a hard worker so that may well be true, but it’s unfair to her as well as to us to give her the responsibility for a major role to which she simply isn’t suited. Nor was I very impressed by Sara Mearns in the glorious second movement—she seemed self-conscious and even a little glum in what many consider Balanchine’s finest ballerina role, with its profound blend of majesty and lyricism. The company’s greatest ballerinas—from Tanaquil LeClercq, Allegra Kent and Suzanne Farrell down through Darci Kistler—gave us radiant, moving accounts of it; Mearns has a way to go. The brilliant allegro third movement, with its dynamic jumps and nonstop brio, was a triumph for Ashley Bouder and Joaquin De Luz, whose polish, the product of his strong Spanish classical training, is different in kind from the less-virtuoso style of the company’s S.A.B.-trained men. In the fourth movement, Tiler Peck took charge and easily propelled the ballet to its thrilling finale. The corps looked prepared throughout; the tempi were pushed.

The new ballets were by Peter Martins and Benjamin Millepied. The theme of the evening was France (hence Bizet). Is it worth describing them in detail? As a responsible ballet master in chief will do on occasion, Martins gave his new ballet, Mes Oiseaux, to members of the corps—three young women and one young man, all highly talented. The music was a propulsive trio for violin, cello and piano by Marc-André Dalbavie; the costumes by Gilles Mendel were French-fashiony—cut-outs exposing patches of the dancers’ skin, short black skirts with bright-color accents. This was one of Martins’s more effective outings—he’s always competent, usually empty, and occasionally stirring. There was nothing surprising here, but Les Oiseaux held together, a riff on the quintessential Balanchine grouping of a man and three women: Apollo, of course; Who Cares?; a central section of Serenade. The young man, Taylor Stanley—solid, strong, masculine, an excellent partner—has a big career ahead of him; the women—Lauren Lovette, Ashly Isaacs, tall, blond Claire Kretzschmar—are all well on their way.

Speaking of empty, Millepied has once again given us a template for emptiness. He’s got the moves, he’s got the glamour, he’s got the connections, he just doesn’t have anything interesting to say. This new piece, Two Hearts—irritating music by Nico Muhly; irritating modish costumes (black and white with ruffly effects) by Californian fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte—is busy, busy, busy. As usual Millepied is more comfortable with small groups (duets, trios) than with larger ones, which in his hands always look cluttered and, yes, irritating. The commissions roll on in; the returns would be diminishing if they had anything to diminish from.

The rest of the season to date has been up and down. An all-Robbins program reminded me that his unpretentious duet Andantino from 1961 is elegant and pleasing, particularly when the featured ballerina is Tiler Peck, whose astonishing musicality and intelligence illumine every step she shows us. This has been a remarkable season for her, and the audience has caught on, despite the fact that she doesn’t sell and she doesn’t flirt. In fact, she could relax her principles and project a bit more personal charm on top of her dance charm—then, she’d be even closer to Patricia McBride, whose repertory she has partly assumed. McBride, too, could do everything.

Ashley Bouder has revealed new aspects of herself, softening her impact (it could hardly be hardened) with a welcome lyricism. Maria Kowroski has finally come into her own, finally accepting her ballerina responsibilities by overcoming her hesitations and revealing her stunning expansiveness and charisma. Sterling Hyltin has become another audience favorite, with her quicksilver attack and piquant prettiness. Alas, Sara Mearns has been frequently out with an injury.

Two other Balanchine ballets were back—one, Kammermusik No. 2, after a long absence. This Hindemith onslaught of a score is not lovable, and neither is the ballet: It’s mechanical, driven, relentless—two couples, often in near unison—against a background of eight massed men, who act as one organism. How often did Balanchine use a male corps this way, apart from the nine “goons” in Prodigal Son and the male regiments in Union Jack? Since the men are so unparticularized, they further dehumanize a work that is far from human to begin with. We need to see Kammermusik occasionally, to ponder it, to acknowledge its virtuosity, and to give the dancers a chance to absorb it, but we don’t really miss it when it’s out of sight.

When Liebeslieder Walzer is out of sight, life dims. Surely this is one of the greatest and most original works in all of Balanchine. The rhapsodic Brahms songs swamp you with feeling when they’re well sung, and this season they were (in the past there have been disasters), all four singers caught up in the beauty and poignancy of the music. In the ’60s, Liebeslieder was appreciated by critics, not audiences; people would get up and leave the theater in the pause between the two sections. Today, the audience sits in rapt silence as the ballet’s four couples play out the complexities, the subtleties, of their interaction and demonstrate the astounding fecundity of Balanchine’s inventiveness and the depth of his emotion.

City Ballet’s dancers can sometimes seem uninterested and uncommitted (as for example they mostly did this season in Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet). But they seem to come to Liebeslieder in a spirit of reverence, aware of the privilege of performing in it. There were two casts. The more seasoned one brought together Kowroski and Bouder, Janie Taylor and Wendy Whelan, partnered by the Angle brothers, Sébastien Marcovici and Jonathan Stafford.

The younger cast introduced Peck, Hyltin and Fairchild (Mearns was still unavailable, so Kowroski danced again). No one dominated; no one, really, rose to the level of earlier performers like Diana Adams, Violette Verdy, Kyra Nichols, Farrell, McBride, but it didn’t matter: The younger dancers found the maturity to inhabit and honor this most grown-up of dance works. We are left with an unanswerable question: How can an hour of 19th-century waltzing lead to such transcendence?

John Jasperse talks about his Fort Blossom—on view recently at New York Live Arts in a version considerably expanded and revised from its premiere a dozen years ago—as reflecting a “kind of tough hope that … I feel is strongly needed by our culture in this particular moment in time.” I don’t know what he’s talking about, or for that matter what the words “Fort Blossom” signify, but I do know a powerful and meaningful dance work when I see one.

The stage is divided in two. On the left side are two women in short reddish-brown dresses. On the right are two naked men. The women for the most part move in tandem, shadowing each other, often with orange plastic see-through cushions strapped to their backs. One of the men, Ben Asriel, after an opening sequence in which, lying on his stomach, he humps his way across the floor, is soon engaged directly with the other man, Burr Johnson. An extended duet that is the heart of the piece finds them in a series of fierce physical encounters, embracing, contorting, simulating sex (one on top of the other, with only a clear plastic pillow between them that slowly leaks air and deflates). We’re almost less full frontal than full rearal—at one point an anus is offered up casually, as if it were a belly button. A cheek is laid tenderly down on a different kind of cheek. A foot slides gently down the crease in a pair of buttocks.

What’s so fascinating, apart from the extraordinary ingenuity of the moment-to-moment activity, is how unerotic, unpornographic all this turns out to be. The effect is sculptural rather than sexual, the genitals almost an irrelevancy. When clothes are simply absent, not provocatively stripped away, somehow bodies seem less like bodies and more like abstractions—think of two Brancusis coupling.

Until the end, the pair of women and the pair of men ignore each other, occupied with their own concerns. At the end, they come together in an easy harmony, a gathering of four dancers rather than a pointed reconciliation of genders. The women have transcended their dresses, the men their nakedness.

(On a happy personal note, the program bios tell that “in his spare moments away from dance, Johnson is in his garden or cuddling with his cat.”)

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Tyler Angle, Maria Kowroski, Amar Ramasar, Sara Mearns, Robert Fairchild, Wendy Whelan and Daniel Ulbricht in "Les Carillons."

As ye sow, so shall ye reap. When a ballet company spends a lot of money on gimmicky pieces, it’s stuck with them for a while—they have to earn their keep. Likewise, when it spends a lot of money on an arid version of a classic, it too has to serve again and again. In its current season, City Ballet is reaping what it sowed: Yet another go round for Peter Martins’s arid, antiromantic Romeo and Juliet, and exhumations of the awful Lynn Taylor-Corbett Seven Deadly Sins (gimmick: Patti LuPone singing—badly—the Kurt Weill/Lotte Lenya songs) and the awful Peter Martin Ocean’s Kingdom (gimmick: music by Paul McCartney). I can’t imagine any knowledgeable ballet-lover wanting to see any of these more than once. The rest of the season is standard City Ballet fare: lots of Balanchine, though nothing out of the ordinary (no revival, say, of Kammermusik No. 2), but some of the big guns—Vienna Waltzes, Union Jack—to complement some of the delicious small fry: Steadfast Tin Soldier, Donizetti Variations. And an assortment of Robbins ranging from the dreary In Memory of … to the frisky Interplay to the classic Fancy Free. And then there’s the one real event: a triple bill from the gifted if erratic Christopher Wheeldon, centered on a newly commissioned piece called Les Carillons. I can tell you what the music is—Bizet’s first and second L’Arlésienne Suites. I can tell you who’s responsible for the bewilderingly pallid and blobby mess of a backdrop (Jean-Marc Puissant) and the oddly unbecoming costumes—boys in brown, one arm bare; three leading women in red gowns, two others not, corps in shimmery blues (Mark Zappone). But I can’t tell you what this ballet is, because on first viewing I didn’t detect a through-line or a unified approach; its five movements seemed more about creating complicated movement for its five ballerinas than about responding to Bizet. It’s showing us a great deal, but what is it telling us? There’s a precedent for a work featuring five ballerinas—Balanchine’s gem of a Mozart ballet, Divertimento No. 15. But it’s unfair to compare Mr. Wheeldon’s new piece to one of Balanchine’s greatest—his talent is not on that level (nor is anyone else’s). What he might have learned from Balanchine, however, is how to knit a ballet composed in sections into a seamless whole, leading to a finale that resolves everything harmoniously instead of just stopping. But this is the very area in which Mr. Wheeldon has always been weakest: deploying a large number of dancers in an effective finale. His finales just look muddled—like what Balanchine used to call “spaghetti.” (This is a failing that he shares with his coeval choreographer Benjamin Millepied.) Where he’s strongest is at identifying the particular skills of his women and revealing them in solos and duets. In Les Carillons he has superb talents to work with. It was he who first grasped the special qualities of Wendy Whelan, in such works as Morphoses and Polyphonia, and they have remained loyal to each other. Here he shows her in an unusually lyrical light—more elegant, less clenched, but effective. And he has recognized and exploited (in the most positive sense of the word) Tiler Peck’s uncanny musicality, giving her a solo of both delicacy and complexity that she sails through as if there were no difficulties, as if she were discovering each ingenious moment as it arrives. This is invention on a high level. And he has encouraged Maria Kowroski along the path to greater expansiveness. She may not be the strongest dancer in the company—far from it—but she’s the most gorgeous, and she’s taken her time to acknowledge how gorgeous she is. When Mr. Wheeldon has her up in the air, those long legs soaring, she’s everything we always thought she could be. With the tremendously talented Sara Mearns he’s less effective—no one has yet shown us who she really is beyond her rushing, thrilling way of moving. Les Carillons is far from a total success, but it’s also far from a failure. What a relief after the fiascoes of Seven Deadly Sins and Ocean’s Kingdom! It was followed on the program by Polyphonia, to me Mr. Wheeldon’s finest ballet. Yes, it’s Balanchine-inflected—that upside-downsy moment from Episodes—but it has its own artistic unity and it gives us Ms. Whelan at her most extraordinary. Talk about signature roles! And although she may be winding down, you wouldn’t know it from this performance. (The beautiful piano score by Ligeti doesn’t hurt.) Alas, the event was blighted by the injury Jennie Somogyi sustained on stage; as she hobbled off, it looked serious. We can only hope it wasn’t a snapped Achilles tendon. Ms. Peck rushed on in her place, revealing yet again that she can dance anything. But that was little solace: Ms. Somogyi has had an injury-ridden career; she should have been one of the great ones. Unfortunately, circumstances kept me from seeing the final ballet of the triple bill—DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse, which Mr. Wheeldon made for the Royal Ballet in 2006 and which was received with great enthusiasm there. I’m particularly sorry to have missed it because I’m always hoping to find him fulfilling the great promise we all saw in him when he arrived on the scene. He’s occasionally astounding, always capable, sometimes slick, never stupid or vulgar. What’s missing? Some inner necessity to make this ballet to this music? Even so, we’re lucky to have him.

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Sterling Hyltin and Andrew Veyette in "Rubies" from Jewels. (Photo: Paul Kolnik)

Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet’s ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at. It’s unfortunate that this became possible only when the financially floundering City Opera was forced to decamp from the David H. Koch Theater. (To be fair, this is one thing we can’t blame on David H. Koch and his politics.) But at least the opera’s loss is dance’s gain.

It seems as if the box office results have justified the change—there were well-stuffed houses at most of the performances I attended—although attendance was undoubtedly enhanced by all the hype for the Paul McCartney/Peter Martins debacle, Ocean’s Kingdom, with the nonfail Swan Lake (also Martins) to further pack them in. Good marketing, bad ballet.

But there were artistic gains to offset the deplorable gimmickry of Ocean’s Kingdom. The company as a whole is looking strong. With most of the dead wood of recent years given their obligatory farewell galas and gone with the wind, the younger stars are stepping up to the important roles and frequently making strong impressions.

The single best performance I witnessed was Sterling Hyltin’s in the “Rubies” section of Jewels. Ms. Hyltin is an odd one. Although she has a perfect small-scale body, a large-scale technique and unaffected charm, and has been given many opportunities, she’s never really claimed a significant part of the repertory. So her triumph in “Rubies” is particularly gratifying. Ms. Hyltin’s quicksilver, fearless attack is right for Stravinsky—she’s already been effective in Stravinsky Violin Concerto and Jeu de cartes— and she’s even improved as Terpsichore in Stravinsky’s Apollo, a role she lacks the essential amplitude for, as she does for Swan Lake. Her current performance in “Rubies,” with its blend of delicacy and brio, is just about the most effective since the great original, Patricia McBride.

Andrew Veyette—along with Robert Fairchild one of the company’s two most talented young male stars—made his “Rubies” debut opposite her, and the combination worked. He still has to lay on some extra macho swagger, but all the elements are there, and the two of them grasp that “Rubies” is a ballet about the two of them in their gleeful competition and complicity. Meanwhile, the towering Teresa Reichlen, as the biggest ruby of them all, dominates the scene without hogging it—it’s her best role, and she’s stunning in it, not only a sight for disbelieving eyes but a technical marvel: she sails through the three often-fatal arabesques penchées without even noticing that they’re impossible. To see a “Rubies” so close in spirit and execution to what Balanchine intended was badly needed balm.

“Emeralds,” that exquisite essence of French glamour and piquancy, had its ups and downs. Abi Stafford, for once, was relaxed and imaginative in the great Violette Verdy role; Ashley Bouder was faithful to it, but she’s an impulsive dancer, not a languorous one. Jenifer Ringer was stiff and brittle as the second ballerina, though slightly less so in her second performance, but I’m afraid she now detracts from the famous “Emeralds” perfume.

As for the climactic “Diamonds,” Wendy Whelan is past it (not that she ever was it). Maria Kowroski has somehow channeled Suzanne Farrell in this role, though she lacks Ms. Farrell’s technical strength and imagination. (Who doesn’t?) What Ms. Kowroski is is beautiful, in the Farrell manner and with the Farrell grandeur. Everybody’s favorite, Sara Mearns, is lovely at every moment, with her gorgeous back and her creamy movement. (From the start, “creamy” has been the critics’ adjective of choice to describe her.) Her dancing is so full-out, so engaged, that she’s irresistible, yet I still don’t find her definitive in many roles. “Diamonds” was one of our last chances to applaud Charles Askegard, who retired on the final day of the season. To the end he was a generous and super-adroit partner, always giving everything he had. His technique had begun to erode, but never his commitment. And he could be funny and sly—as he was in the Peter Martins sailor role in Union Jack. Best of all, at least for a number of the ballerinas, he was tall! Mr. Askegard is one of old-timers we’ll miss.

Another debut: Robert Fairchild in Apollo. When it was over, I could only think, “What a nice guy!” But Apollo isn’t a nice guy, he’s a god coming into his own. With nice girl Hyltin opposite him as Terpsichore, it was a little like watching two adorable kids at the junior hop. But Mr. Fairchild has all the equipment (even if he isn’t a natural Apollo like Chase Finlay), and he will ripen in the role just as Balanchine’s Apollo is meant to ripen. Best by far in the cast was Tiler Peck as Polyhymnia, but whenever she’s on stage she’s almost invariably the best. She can do everything, and with a deeper musicality than any of the other City Ballet women. She almost succeeded in making Christopher Wheeldon’s programmatic Mercurial Manoeuvres—and its unyielding Shostakovich score—seem appealing. Why the company doesn’t exploit her talents more fully is one of the mysteries.

Other young dancers are proving what an amazing job the School of American Ballet is doing in providing the company with waves of fresh talent. The unfolding drama of New York City Ballet continues. The new dancers are on the whole more technically polished and secure than those of the past, even if they generally have less dance expressivity. This is also true, of course, of movie stars, musical-comedy stars, opera stars: the great ones of the past were bigger than life. (Ms. Farrell was the last.) Today, we settle for—we seem to prefer—lifelike.

In the past several weeks two old-timers of the modern dance world have been showing off their wares. Both Bill T. Jones and Garth Fagan have had big Broadway triumphs—Fela! for Mr. Jones, The Lion King for Mr. Fagan. Both companies draw strength from their veteran dancers. And neither choreographer works on the highest level. But there the resemblances stop. Mr. Jones has courted, or at least welcomed, notoriety and hype—he’s unmistakably ambitious; Mr. Fagan just seems to go about his business, making dances, touring and turning up at the Joyce every couple of years.

Mr. Jones has been the pretentious one, but he seems to have calmed down. His recent season was dominated by rather bland duets, which all too frequently add up to athletic doodling. Moments of stillness are inevitably interrupted by eruptions of movement. There’s synchronized jumping, there’s slo-mo, there’s gasping and grunting. The best of the pieces on show was Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction), whatever that means, which Mr. Jones made with his late partner, Arnie Zanes, more than 30 years ago. Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent are an earnest young couple who walk a lot, run around a lot, fight, spoon and bat single words back and forth: “Milk,” “Cow,” “Farm.” They’re very touching and convincing, helped by being dressed in the casual elegance that Liz Prince’s costumes always provide.

Mr. Jones also revived Continuous Replay, which he made with Mr. Zanes in 1977. This is the one in which the whole company turns up nude, a fairly depressing sight. Gradually they get dressed, proving yet again that dancers look better with their clothes on.

Mr. Fagan’s work is wholly admirable if not wholly interesting. His strongest point is his company—these are uniformly energized and exciting dancers. Most amazing is Norwood Pennewell, who’s worked with Mr. Fagan since 1978 and is as assured, relaxed and commanding as he’s always been. How does he do it? Tall, long limbed, with a becoming little mustache, he’s a paragon, reigning over his flock through his inborn authority—an example to us all. His is a natural Apollonian presence, whereas the new male star, the Haitian Vitolio Jeune, is Dionysian to the max. He’s shorter, compacter, and explosive. He just can’t help coiling a little tighter, jumping a little higher, staying aloft a little longer. Mr. Pennewell is a cool cat, Mr. Jeune is a hot cat. And a star presence—he’s even appeared on So You Think You Can Dance. The women are terrific, too—especially the contained but deeply expressive Nicolette Depass, who’s been around only since the mid-’90s.

Mr. Fagan’s new piece, Madiba, is an abstract celebration or meditation on Nelson Mandela. To not much purpose: It’s sincere, but that’s not enough. (Mr. Pennewell has a new piece, too—Liminal Flux—very much in the Fagan tradition.) Most of the music Mr. Fagan favors is of the portentous-jazz variety (Madiba is danced to Abdullah Ibrahim). His choreography isn’t very memorable, but that’s O.K.—it isn’t concepty, it isn’t vulgar, and it shows off his admirable and exhilarating dancers.

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The downside is easy to identify: the non-Balanchine repertory. There are the Robbins contributions (though few of his best works are on view); there's a little Wheeldon. Otherwise, it's a desert littered with gimmicky "pop" ballets that Peter Martins has wasted the company's money on in his desperate search for hits. (No wonder the deficit is so big.)

This season City Ballet is dishing up Martins's own Thou Swell to Rodgers and Hart--a blasphemy. We're heading for Susan Stroman's disastrous For the Love of Duke--a pathetic hangover from last season. And now we have yet another Broadway connection: Patti LuPone, imported to give credibility to a new and tedious version of The Seven Deadly Sins created by the lackluster choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett. Balanchine collaborated on the original with Brecht and Weill in 1933, then made an entirely new version in 1958, with the "Anna" who dances choreographed for the very young Allegra Kent--it confirmed her stardom.

In both of those productions, the "Anna" who sings was Lotte Lenya, the essence and symbol of Weimar Berlin. LuPone came across as the essence and symbol of exhausted Broadway, more Mama Rose than Sister Anna. Weill's music was uncongenial to her style (as well as poorly amped--you couldn't make out half of what she was singing), and steered clear of the sordid aspects of the role (its only aspects); she was merely a middle-aged lady trudging across the stage with a suitcase. Sins was just another misfiring gimmick. The audience responded glumly: After the hype, the crash.

Sloth, Pride, Anger, Gluttony, Lust, Avarice, Envy? No. Taylor-Corbett's sins were deadlier: Blandness, boredom, confusion, vacuity, dreariness, pointlessness, pretention. Wendy Whelan, twenty years in the company, was cast as the very young and innocent dancing Anna and given hardly anything to do but wander around passively, occasionally reaching up pathetically to the moon. The secondary dancers (including poor Sara Mearns and Craig Hall) should sue for the time they wasted participating in this futile and frustrating endeavor. The corps--City Ballet's best and brightest--might as well have been invisible, the dance invention was so weak and derivative. The most effective performances came from two singers, Raymond Jarmillo McLeod as the mother and Andrew Stenson as the younger brother. The one real plus: If you'd seen Sins once, you could sit it out the next time and chat with your pals.

The Deadlies were paired with Vienna Waltzes, for the most part looking good again. In the opening section, Ellen Bar, in her final days with the company, gave the best performance I've ever seen her give--fluent and moving. Maria Kowroski was not only beautiful and elegant but commanding in the great Rosenkavalier finale. Only Ana Sophia Scheller in the "Explosion Polka" was miscast: jokey she isn't. And no one can be blamed for the inevitable letdown of the "Gold and Silver Waltz," one of Balanchine's very few duds. Mr. Martins and Kay Mazzo could never pull it off, and certainly Jenifer Ringer and Ask la Cour can't either, she muffled in costume, he awkward and gawky, the two of them barely connecting. But even Pavlova and Nijinsky couldn't invigorate this empty exercise in schmaltz.

Kowroski is only one of the younger dancers to be blossoming (at last). Janie Taylor gave us a glorious performance of Afternoon of a Faun--the combination of lyricism and narcissism with her unique feral intensity was revelatory. Tiler Peck is brilliant in everything--I missed an unannounced Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux that's reported to have been the best in years (no surprise), but was thrilled by her Tarantella; she actually made me forget Patty McBride.

The two young women who have been dominating the repertory--Ms. Mearns and Teresa Reichlen--are so unalike that I found it difficult to watch them together in Concerto Barocco (not that the two female leads are meant to be a perfect match). Their looks are so dissimilar that you're immediately startled: Reichlen with her impossibly long limbs and torso and her small head; Mearns with her compact yet soft form, more flesh than bone. A more important difference lies in the way they dance. Reichlen is cool, remote, authoritative; Mearns is personal, full-out, going for broke even when, as in Barocco, there's no broke to go for. For me, though both women danced superbly, they seemed less in contrast than in opposition. When they were onstage together, I didn't know what ballet I was in.

Megan Fairchild, who was rushed to the top so quickly that she frequently seemed bewildered, has been growing more confident, which means that she's relying less on adorable punctuation. She still lacks the authority for the central ballerina role in Divertimento No. 15, but she isn't dragging it down the way she used to. Sterling Hyltin showed the grace and attack needed for the second variation, and Lauren King, still in the corps but dancing on a soloist level, was a particular delight in the first. The ballet wasn't ideally cast, but overall it was respectable.

The senior dancers who are left are looking good too. Whelan, so foolishly deployed in The Seven Deadly Sins, was at her absolute finest in Wheeldon's masterly Polyphonia, the ballet that first identified her special talents--and his. And Jennie Somogyi demonstrated the value of experience and a mature dance intelligence in such varied roles as "Sanguinic" in The Four Temperaments and the Coquette in La Sonnambula.

Finally, in Andrew Veyette the company now has a major male talent, the first in a long while. His growth as a technician and as an artist has been spectacular--we've seen it this season in Agon and again in Divertimento. If you can meet the challenges of those two radically different ballets, you can presumably do everything.

How to explain the seismic shift in performance level at City Ballet? Everyone's asking, and no one has the answer. Certainly, rehearsing and dancing so much Balanchine has to be part of it: you don't learn a lot from dancing Thou Swell or Susan Stroman. And as I say, the recent wholesale clearing of dead wood has provided new opportunities to the up-and-comers. Or maybe the ballet masters have just had more time for the fundamentals--apart from The Seven Deadly Sins, no energy has been wasted on worthless distractions. Whatever the reasons, this is the company's--and Peter Martins's--finest hour since Balanchine died.

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In the old days, it was daring for the company to schedule an entire evening of the black-and-whites--it happened maybe once a year; the audience was still coming to grips with the avant-garde music (Stravinsky, Webern, Hindemith) and extreme choreography of Agon, Episodes, The Four Temperaments, even though the latter had been around since 1946. (It still looks more modern, more challenging, than 90 percent of today's newest ballets.) And it was this starker side of Balanchine's work, reinforced by the 1972 Stravinsky Festival (Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Symphony in Three Movements, Duo Concertant), that many people first thought of when they spoke of Balanchine; these "abstract" ballets seemed revolutionary, and for a long time were thought to be caviar to the general.

To see so many of these once-daunting masterworks, now old friends, gathered together, made it clear that their effect on us has not been eroded by familiarity. Apollo followed by The Four T's--each of them so filled with the genius of invention, each so central to the history of 20th-century ballet--was almost too much to absorb. It didn't really matter that none of the performances was ideal; they were accurate enough to convey Balanchine's intentions. And because they opened the season, there had been time to rehearse them properly; they weren't just flung onto the stage.

The most anticipated event of the week was the debut of the very young Chase Finlay as Apollo--this is only his second year in the company. Apollo is not easy to get right: He's a newborn cub at the beginning who, from his gleeful awakening, grows into his strengths--taking command, and ultimately achieving godhead; he has to be playful and majestic, jazzy and severe. And it helps if he's a beauty. Finlay is a born Apollo, and a surprisingly relaxed one. His size is average, his looks fall between the heroic (Peter Martins) and the impish (Edward Villella) and his carriage is both manly and pliant. He's appropriately excited and impetuous in his early passages, and appropriately responsive to his three muses. The evolution to maturity is as yet sketched rather than realized, but it will come.

The muses themselves were less satisfying, except for Tiler Peck as Polyhymnia--as always utterly musical and fully energized; if I were Apollo, she'd be my muse of choice. The script, however, requires him to choose Terpsichore, at this performance danced by Sterling Hyltin, also a debut. Alas, she makes the same limited impression she so frequently does. Her body is slim, perfectly proportioned; her dancing is fresh and sprightly. But there's no depth, no profound response to the music. Her Terpsichore is charming, but there's no underlying gravity, no essence of the dance--she's a nice girl, but Apollo deserves more. As Calliope, Ana Sophia Scheller is competent and dry, as usual. But despite my reservations, I found this Apollo--with its engaging and engaged young god at its center--a revelation all over again, ballet's crucial work of modernism, as many have called it, and a masterpiece of the first order.

Agon--like Apollo and The Four Temperaments a ground-breaking work--received a dutiful performance. Wendy Whelan in the duet has begun to lose her astounding elasticity, and this was never her finest role, but the fierce jazziness Andrew Veyette brought to the first pas de trois, gave it an excitement I've never seen matched. This was original and remarkable dancing.

More gratifying than Agon was Episodes, the startling, thorny ballet set to Webern that came along two years later and seemed a further step into the unknown. I was at its premiere in 1959 and remember very well the shock of the extreme, jagged vocabulary of its opening sections and the contrasting harmonious beauty, at the end, of Webern's orchestration of the ricercata from Bach's "Musical Offering." We don't get to see Episodes very often--it's never been an audience favorite--but it's a work of immense daring and provocative invention. Only Teresa Reichlen fulfilled its intentions until the ricercata itself, when Sara Mearns, skillfully partnered by Jonathan Stafford, resolved the tensions of the earlier sections in a flowing, generous performance. (She is actually more suited to this glorious music than the original, Melissa Hayden, who was many impressive things, but was hardly known for embodying harmony.) Episodes stands up as a major work, even with lusterless performances that lack, among other things, the quirkiness and wit of the first cast--Violette Verdy, Diana Adams, Allegra Kent--and even without the amazing solo Balanchine concocted for Paul Taylor, on loan from Martha Graham. Think of a fly trapped in a bottle of milk, Balanchine told him, and Taylor did. (He's always been partial to insects.) The absence of the Taylor solo, which could still be resurrected, is a serious diminishment of this important ballet's impact.

The fact that all these ballets have been so studiously rehearsed only underscores the sad reality that for the most part they aren't adequately coached. Surely Megan Fairchild could be helped to be more decisive and accurate in Square Dance: She relies far too much on cute punctuation--adorable tilts of the head, etc. Amar Ramasar should be pushed to appear more fully invested in what he's doing. Abi Stafford has to be helped to project a dance personality--though she's consistently capable, she's almost an invisible presence.

Most important, the corps needs to be energized as well as regimented. When the curtain goes up on Symphony in Three Movements, the long diagonal line of girls in ponytails and white leotards is one of the most stunning images in all of Balanchine. But Balanchine wanted his dancers radiating energy even when standing still. Today's corps just stands there, waiting for their cue to move. This failure is all too evident throughout the repertory--it's the most notable difference between Balanchine in his day and Balanchine in ours. If the well-drilled corps in Symphony in Three Movements, say, absorbed the way Tiler Peck and Daniel Ulbricht danced alongside them--alive, full-out, holding nothing back--they'd have no problem. Well, at least they aren't chewing gum.

To end on a happier note: Maria Kowroski, she of the glorious body and legs, is finally coming into her own, her back stronger and her confidence greater. In both Monumentum/Movements and the first "aria" of Stravinsky Violin Concerto she looked in total charge, although she could still be helped to emphasize the contortionist/acrobatic aspects of the role. What matters is that she's finally becoming a real ballerina. Perhaps strong coaching would have got her to this point earlier, but better late than never.

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Orbs also provided Taylor with one of his greatest roles: His character is the Sun (in a white unitard, decorated with silver stars), and around him revolve the planets and moons. He presents them--the planets in two male-female couples, the moons four ravishing girls in shimmering Alex Katz costumes--and proceeds to instruct, nurture, discipline and cherish them.

The four sections of Orbs represent the four seasons, beginning with "Venusian Spring," in which he demonstrates the ways of sexual love to his celestial brood. (They learn fast.) On to the confrontational "Martian Summer"--set to the formidable Grosse Fuge.

When, after the intermission, we find ourselves down to Earth and among mere humans, it's at an autumn wedding. Everyone's in brown. The Sun is now the solemn, yet occasionally sly, minister. The bride and her bridesmaids and her conventionally weeping mother are our old friends, the female planets and their moons. We recognize the male planets in the groom, frantic with nerves--obsessively checking his hair, his tie, his fly--and his best man. The wedding takes place, there's a nutty outdoor feast with an outlandish roasted bird flung about, and there's much fluttering from the women, with their affectionate homage to and parody of the girls at another wedding, the one in Graham's Appalachian Spring. (Graham at this period was never far out of Taylor's mind.)

And then we're back in the heavens, for the most beautiful and resonant passage in the entire work--"Plutonian Winter." The orbs are deadened, life has drawn to a halt. Here we're reminded of the plangent sadness that informs another of Taylor's finest works, Sunset. The planets, their moons at their feet, are isolated in their separate muted spotlights. (Exceptionally striking in her desolation is the magnificent Amy Young, holding the most beautifully posed and poised balance I've ever seen. She's frozen in her stillness--secure beyond secure.) The now-dimmed Sun presides.

Paul Taylor may be a pessimist, but he's not a sadist, at least not here. Winter, too, passes, and he brings the Sun and its satellites back to life and harmony in a reaffirming whirlwind of a coda. (It's like the coda to Don Giovanni when normal existence resumes after the Don's descent into Hell.)

The outpouring of invention in Orbs is endless, its felicities countless--no wonder Arlene Croce referred to it as "perhaps the most charming work in the modern dance repertory." Because the Taylor season was cut from three to two weeks this year--the City Center is again shutting down for repairs, and nothing can be allowed to interfere with the Encores series--Orbs was presented only twice. Let's hope we don't have to wait another thirty years to see it again.

In one of his two new works, the traditional "light" one, Taylor has stuck it to us again. Or to put it more graphically (and literally), he's given us the finger. (That's Robert Kleinendorst giving it to us, in the guise of a drunken bum who lurches into Phantasmagoria late in the game.) But Taylor's been giving it to us--or to the history of dance--from the word go, in this series of benign jabs at various dance modes down through the ages.

He begins with a peasanty mob out of Breughel with their kerchiefs (girls) and cod-pieces (boys) roistering as if trapped in a bad production of Carmina Burana. (Is there any other kind?) Here are the "East Indian Adam and Eve," parodying the kind of Asian dance which all too often parodies itself. There's the Byzantine nun having too much fun with a large, stuffed green snake. (Is this a nod to Martha Graham's Medea ballet, Cave of the Heart? Or to Graham's Embattled Garden, in which Taylor himself played the snake?) There's the Irish step dance, put in its place by the comical (and African-American) Michelle Fleet. Here come the silly, gauzy Isadorables floating around in clouds of white. Finally, here's Michael Trusnovec infecting the whole crowd with St. Vitus' dance. And let's not forget the Renaissance music, played in all-too-authentic period-instrument mode. Taylor's having fun at everybody's expense--he's earned the right.

His "serious" new work, Three Dubious Memories--a riff on Rashomon--is by definition more ambiguous. Yes, we have the married couple assaulted by the brigand--but it's three different pairings of the two men and one woman who sustain the assaults. (Kurosawa might have been surprised to see that the third couple is comprised of the Man in Green and the Man in Blue, whose idyll is violently interrupted by the Woman in Red.) The fourth player in the piece is the group of seven "Choristers" led by the "Choirmaster"--a grave James Samson, who with his commanding height and imposing presence is taking over the commentator/leader roles that Taylor used to make for himself; Samson's impressive performance as the Sun in Orbs is the most obvious current example. In this case, the chorus is observer, judge and jury--and more stimulating to Taylor, it seems to me, than the three antagonists, whose stories are efficiently, even effectively, told, but who can't help seeming pallid when compared to Kurosawa's great originals.

There were various revivals, most surprisingly of The Word (1998), to an original and far too long score by David Israel. It's a vision of a regimented religious and/or political school with everybody, male and female, got up in Mädchen in Uniform garb--high white socks, shorts to the knee, white shirts, suspenders and striped ties. Conformity, suppression and then--enter sex, in the shape of the gorgeous Parisa Khobdeh, slinky and ultra-seductive, in a skin-tight beige unitard. She certainly turned my head. The Word is more dutiful than exciting, but it was good to be able to check it out again.

The stand-bys were on hand--Company B, Esplanade, Cloven Kingdom, Promethean Fire. For me, the most satisfying all-around performance was of Arden Court, the dance that proves that you don't have to worry about running out of Handel: There are always the rousing symphonies of William Boyce to fall back on.

Every year we watch the Taylor company renewing itself, the more recent additions to the roster assuming larger roles and beginning to reveal themselves in lesser ones. This season Sean Mahoney, Eran Bugge and Francisco Graciano matured into major players, and Aileen Roehl, a blond kewpie doll, exploded onto the scene. Robert Kleinendorst, in everything, revealed his unique artistry. He lacks the lean and hungry look of many of his colleagues, but no matter what he's doing, passionate or comical or tormented, every moment, every gesture, is filled with subtle musicality and deep personal accent. A hero. 

Finally, alas, we come to Annmaria Mazzini. This tempest-uous, alluring, prime exemplar of the phenomenon of going all the way (and beyond) has worn out her hip in Mr. Taylor's service, and ours. It was only yesterday--a mere dozen years ago--that she and her frequent partner Michael Trusnovec more or less took over the Taylor stage. Now she's retiring, a devastating loss. My heart was broken when Carolyn Adams departed. Then it was Ruth Andrien. Then Kate Johnson. I still miss them. But I think I'm going to miss Mazzini more.

Two quick
notes on the end of the recent City Ballet season, to compensate for my exasperated review of its opening weeks. First, a thrilling reading of the Swan Lake score by the conductor Andrews Sill. I can't remember hearing it played so forcefully and supply, aided, of course, by the vastly improved acoustics at what I can't keep myself from calling the State Theater. (Alas, a badly miscast Sterling Hyltin was a wholly inadequate Odette-Odile.) And finally a superb Balanchinian performance by Andrew Veyette in Valse-
Fantaisie. He's not only raised his game as a classical technician, but he's grown more assured, elegant and musical. Another hero.

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Walpurgisnacht Ballet is one of Balanchine's lesser efforts, created in 1980 as a late vehicle for Suzanne Farrell. She managed to make it thrilling--if you were going in for wild abandon à la Faust, Farrell was your girl. Wendy Whelan is not your girl. She has many virtues, but wild abandon is not one of them. As always, she works hard to meet Balanchine's demands, but she's stymied here by her temperament. Not even Farrell, though, could have expressed wild abandon opposite Charles Askegard. He remains a first-rate partner, and this is a role that needs first-rate partnering, but he's grown so stiff and creaky that you feel sorry for him for actually having to move.

This minor piece was followed, after a short pause, by Mr. B's lovely Duo Concertant, choreographed on Peter Martins and Kay Mazzo for the Stravinsky Festival of 1972. Up on the stage are the two principals and the "Duo" itself--the piano and the violin. The dancers listen, join in, go from joyous participation to haunting comings and going in the dark. Duo suited Martins' grave playfulness (yes, I know that may sound contradictory) and Mazzo's cameo beauty. Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild were more frisky than playful, and the whole thing didn't add up. So ended the first half of the night's proceedings.

After the intermission came another small-scale work, Valse-Fantaisie (principal couple and four girls)--charming, short, pleasingly danced by Ashley Bouder and Andrew Veyette and decidedly lightweight. Then at last a masterpiece, The Four Temperaments. It doesn't usually work best as a closer, but here it was rain on parched earth.

The three "themes" were underwhelmingly danced; these are profound roles, but they hadn't been thought through, as if no one involved thought they really mattered. Of the principals, only Jennie Somogyi danced with the essential Balanchine intensity and expressivity--her phrasing, the way she so easily reveals meaning with every step and gesture, are almost unique at City Ballet now-a throwback to the great days. Teresa Reichlen, that large, impressive creature with her faultless technique, reveals nothing, at least to me. Her "Choleric" is scary-looking, but it isn't truly fierce. About Sébastian Marcovici's "Melancholic," we can gratefully say that he has recently slimmed down. As for Ask la Cour's "Phlegmatic," it's only fair to acknowledge that he's no more clueless than most of the other guys who've wrestled with it in recent years.

Four ballets up, four ballets down. Starvation diet, but an early night for the orchestra--and the commuters.

A later program was far more satisfactory--and then far more discouraging. The large satisfactions came from flawless performances of two of the very rare worthwhile new ballets of the past 10 years, Christopher Wheeldon's Polyphonia and Alexei Ratmansky's Concerto DSCH.

The first, set to bracing piano music by Ligeti, is for four couples, and it drops in on Agon, Episodes and The Four T's, in affectionate homage, not as pastiche or plagiarism. Here, ironically, Wheeldon is at his most original and unlabored--unstintingly inventive. And perfectly served by his dancers: Somogyi and Maria Kowroski, unsurprisingly, but also two of the most exciting of the new girls, Brittany Pollack and Lauren Lovette, who was hypnotizing in a long, slow solo. Polyphonia and Morphoses were Wheeldon's breakthrough ballets. We're still hoping that he'll rise to that level of achievement again.

The Ratmansky, only a couple of years old, is beginning to look like a classic. It's so cleverly constructed: the romantic lead couple (Whelan at her best with her excellent partner, Tyler Angle) in contrast to the bouncy trio of Bouder, Veyette and Joaquin de Luz. The central duet, to Shostakovich's ravishingly melodious adagio movement, is ingenious as well as luminous. And best of all, perhaps, the endlessly various and beautiful material for the six demi-soloists who provide background (and sometimes foreground) for the leads. Ratmansky's marked talent for group movement keeps drawing your eye from the duet--until Whelan and Angle pull you back.

So far, so good.

And then a dizzying descent. A work by Susan Stroman, billed as a world premiere and called For the Love of Duke (that's Duke Ellington, plus Billy Strayhorn), turned out to be only half a world premiere. We first saw its second section a dozen years ago, under the title Blossom Got Kissed, a cute and harmless throwaway, memorable only because it was the ballet that showed us that Kowroski could be funny as well as gorgeous. But compared to the new section, called Frankie and Johnny... and Rose, it looks like The Sleeping Beauty. (The City Ballet program chooses not to indicate the original date of Blossom Got Kissed. Do they think we've all forgotten?)

In the long run it doesn't matter that For the Love of Duke isn't really a world premiere; what matters is that Frankie and Johnny is so drearily vapid and clichéd. The Dave Berger Jazz Orchestra is up on the stage. In front of it is a bench. There's a guy with a wandering eye--Johnny. There's a pair of silly rival girls jockeying for his favor--Frankie and Rose. As his attention drifts, he pushes first one, then the other off the bench, and they disappear behind it. (Hilarity.) Everything else is generic hoofing, except for those steps Stroman has snatched from Who Cares? Balanchine made a brilliant ballet out of show-business music. Stroman, without a clue about ballet choreography, has concepts instead of steps--I'm still reeling from her pretentious and empty hit Contact.

The hero, if that's what he is, was danced by Amar Ramasar, an appealing dancer but by no means a strong enough presence to carry off this bit of nothing. The girls are Tiler Peck and Sarah Mearns, both terrific dancers who here define the word "wasted." And speaking of waste, why waste more words on this fiasco? The best thing I can say about it is that it would have fit right in with the worst of the seven premieres of last year's spring season. Susan Stroman has a billion Broadway hits behind her, and hats off! But please--let's keep her away from the City Ballet stage.

editorial@observer.com

"Fall for Dance" flings a wide, if not always discriminating, net over the dance world. There's not a lot of money for them to spend--tickets remain at the fantastic bargain-basement price of $10 each--so big ballet companies can't or won't bring in big works: ABT throws in a duet, San Francisco the same, City Ballet a quartet. Modern companies are more generous: Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Larry Keigwin, Ronald K. Brown came with more richly populated offerings.

The opening piece on opening night was XOVER, a very late Cunningham work being featured in his company's worldwide farewell tour. It is to my abiding regret and shame that for 50 years Cunningham has eluded me. I recognize the clarity, the elegance, the intelligence, but watching him, I feel the way you do when you're watching a sport whose rules you don't know and can't figure out. XOVER seemed to me as opaque as almost all the other Cunningham pieces I've struggled to enjoy. The sound--I can't call it music--was more egregious than usual: a singer named Joan La Barbara shrieking, gurgling, howling, moaning in scraps of several languages. And then it was over.

Along the way, the season served up the exotic (India's smuggish, plumpish Madhavi Mudgal); the pretentious (Carolyn Carlson's Man in a Room, which, "inspired by the life of painter Mark Rothko ... explores man's creative anxiety"); the overexposed (the Thaïs Pas de Deux; Red Angels); the happy reminders (Brown's Grace); the old favorites (Company B, The Golden Section); the irritating (William Forsythe's The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude); the vacuous (Yuri Possokhov's Diving Into the Lilacs--what makes San Francisco insist that he's a choreographer?); and--as it's done before--a sensational surprise.

One year, it was a group of enchanting Carpathian folk dancers; another, a pair of white-bread brothers showing off their fabulous Minnesota brand of tapping and drumming. This year, out of nowhere--well, Rio--came the Companhia Urbana de Dança with nine terrific guys mixing hip-hop and modern-dance moves in a totally satisfying work by the company's director, Sonia Destri. For once, hip-hop was used to an artistic end and not merely as exhibitionism, however exciting. The mood was dark. The dancers blended their individual specialties into a rigorous though never rigid progress from meditative to explosive. There was an idea in charge, but not an agenda.

Will hip-hop prove to be the liberating force that can invigorate today's dance, rescuing it from pretension and exhaustion? A less substantial, more conventional, yet still stimulating use of it motored Jason Samuel Smith's Rhythmdome, presented as a challenge--a street clash--between four tappers and four hip-hoppers. Alas, as in so many desperate new works, there was a portentous spoken commentary, but the tappers' saxophonist, Stacy Dillard, and his hip-hop counterpart, DJ DP One at his turntables, made up for it. This piece was hardly original, but again it demonstrated how recent social dance forms can liven things up. What's harder is reinvigorating old forms, as Rafaela Carrasco failed to do with flamenco. She's robust, she's slick and she's trying too hard. Her musicians, though, were spectacular.

There was more, much more, with one other offering worth singling out: a solo called AfterLight Part 1 by Russell Maliphant, featuring an intense, moving performance by Daniel Proietto in the semi-dark. A kind of meditation on Nijinsky, it invoked his state of mind rather than his tragic story, and against the odds, it worked. (He had Satie's Gnossiennes 1-4 to help him out.) I refuse to discuss Shu-Yi & Dancers: I've gone on strike to protest all works set to Ravel's Bolero.

Overall, then, by no means the most exciting "Fall for Dance" season--but with its moments. One heartfelt plea: Next year, please tame the constant over-miking. The final course on the menu--Brown's Grace--was almost unbearably loud. It's a much more subtle work than the City Center's sound system would have you believe. 

THE CITY BALLET fall gala was weakly programmed but mercifully short. (The swanky folk in the audience have to get to their dinner.) The centerpiece of the evening was yet another new ballet by Benjamin Millepied, his first for the company in at least five months, and just as empty as all the others. Title: Plainspoken. (Why?) Music: a less than magnificent commissioned score by David Lang, whom we had just encountered at the Guggenheim. (Is he going to prove as ubiquitous as Millepied?) Cast: four couples plucked from the company's finest. Costumes: Karen Young's hideous acid yellow-green tops for the men and purple bunchy things for the women that made beautiful Teresa Reichlen look not just tall but big. The most--the only--affecting moment was a long mysterious duet for Janie Taylor, floating in the air with the help of Jared Angle's capable partnering. As always, Millepied is efficient ... and utterly unmemorable. The big question is why he secures so many commissions.

Accompanying this nullity was a tepid performance of Jerome Robbins' I'm Old-Fashioned, which shoots itself in both feet by starting out and ending up with huge-screen Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth in their wonderful Jerome Kern duet from You Were Never Lovelier. Not only do the dancers onstage look like confused ants compared to the radiant images onscreen, but the disparity between Astaire's exquisite choreography and Robbins' dutiful attempt to embroider on it is an embarrassment. As for Balanchine's Tarentella, Daniel Ulbricht and Ashley Bouder, for all their virtuosity, have it all wrong. This charmer was originally danced by a randy Edward Villella and a wickedly, subtly flirtatious Patricia McBride. The current two treat it as an occasion for tricks, and they're mugging more and more with every performance. If only Ulbricht would forget about his tambourine and keep his eyes on the girl!

IT WAS AN emotional return to BAM for Pina Bausch's company so soon after her shockingly sudden death last year. Vollmond (Full Moon), created in 2006 but unseen until now in New York, is a full-evening work that isn't Pina-heavy and isn't really Pina-lite; it's more Pina fooling around with water effects and a big boulder. The men fling themselves around--at times splashing and slithering like crocodiles through the onstage pool of water and in the occasional downpour, while clambering up and over and even under that boulder. The women, often in Bausch's trademark gorgeous gowns, are frequently soaked, too, as they make their trademark enigmatic and often funny remarks, and fiddle with glasses, cigarettes, buckets and waiters. There are angry moments, sad moments, comical moments and many wet moments--it's all familiar, and a lot of it effective. But the whole thing does suggest that Pina Bausch was running out of steam: There's nothing here that wasn't more interesting earlier on. It's always a little sad when a turbulent New Wave subsides into still waters.

rgottlieb@observer.com

Again and again we've been told that the retirement of Darci Kistler from City Ballet-after a career of 30 years-was the end of an era: the era of ballerinas anointed by Balanchine. When she was 16, he brought her into the company, and within months she was dancing the Swan Queen, the Sugarplum Fairy, the great adagio movement from Symphony in C. She was the last of the very young girls he had discovered and groomed, beginning with the famous "baby ballerinas" of the early '30s (Toumanova, Baronova, Riabouchinska) and including LeClercq, Kent, Farrell, Kirkland: the God-given ones.

Kistler, indeed, in those early days, seemed like the offspring of the gods. She was not only amazingly talented but she radiated joy, health, beauty, confidence. She was golden. When Balanchine died, in 1983, she was the future. Yet she had already suffered the injury to her ankle that was to determine the rest of her career-not only her immediate prolonged absence from the stage but the brake on the grandeur, the opulence of her movement. She remained a glorious presence, she remained a lovable and beloved figure, but she never regained her absolute command.

And so her farewell gala was an emotionally complicated event. The cheering, the kisses, the flowers, the sparkling confetti were all in place; who could deny their appropriateness? She had earned them. But who could resist feeling sad not simply at her departure-Pavlova departed, Fonteyn departed-but at the ill luck that kept her from becoming not only the darling of City Ballet but the great dancer of her time. It might not have happened-but it might have.

The gala program itself was a mixed blessing. Despite some tactfully modified choreography, it was clear that the exposed vocabulary of Monumentum/Movements was now beyond Kistler. But although she was more kittenish than she used to be as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream-she danced the Bottom pas de deux-she was charming, enticing and young, not only in look but in quality of movement. And in the final act of Peter Martins' Swan Lake, she showed us what a ballerina she had been; what a ballerina is. She made it easy for us to give a wholehearted final embrace to Balanchine's last girl.

THE KISTLER FAREWELL came at the end of an exhausting season. As we know from Gypsy, ya gotta have a gimmick, and this time out we had two. There was the ambitious program of seven premieres. And there was the "Architecture of Dance" theme, with five of the new works designed by the acclaimed architect Santiago Calatrava. (There was also a short, self-congratulatory documentary about this collaboration, which, after you'd been stuck seeing it more than once, you wanted to wipe from the screen.)  

The seven premieres were no better and no worse than was predictable and predicted. Ratmansky's Namouna, A Grand Divertissement was the only one of substance-long, quirky and irresistible. From England, Wayne McGregor; from Italy, Mauro Bigonzetti; and from France, Benjamin Millepied gave us efficient, energized exercises, all equally empty and all gone tomorrow-who can even remember their names today? Melissa Barak produced an unspeakable mishmash about Bugsy Siegel that defies belief and description. Christopher Wheeldon came up with a piece of irrelevant retro populism involving horses and cowgirls, which at least pleased the crowd.

And in the final week of the season, Peter Martins unveiled a new work, Mirage, that brought us a distinguished score-Esa-Pekka Salonen's Violin Concerto, conducted by the composer and played by Leila Josefowicz-that stood out in contrast to the newly commissioned works by other hands. The ballet itself, however, didn't stand out, and for the usual reasons: Martins is always capable, but his movement vocabulary is so limited that there's never much to watch-he's the exact opposite of Ratmansky, whose Namouna was brimming with invention. (Happily, though, Martins gave the central role to the very talented Jennie Somogyi.)

As for Calatrava, two of his designs, the Wheeldon and the Barak, were pictorial rather than architectural, and who needed a major architect for those? The Millepied, Bigonzetti and Martins ballets were furnished with huge, handsome constructs that occasionally moved and changed color, and, particularly when hovering overhead, distracted the audience from the dancers. The Calatrava connection may have been a public-relations coup, but it was an artistic misfire.

Meanwhile, the company was churning out general repertory, with not very happy results. The corps was under-rehearsed except in the new pieces-an egregious example: Kistler's swans. Prodigal Son was a vacuum: Joaquin De Luz doesn't have a clue; Maria Kowroski is a gorgeous Siren, also clueless; the "goons" were boring, not threatening. Only Sean Suozzi as one of the servants restored this masterpiece to life. Western Symphony was listless and lusterless until the third movement, when Sara Mearns and Robert Fairchild, the heroes of the season, kicked in. Suddenly, the whole thing sprang to life, the way Balanchine does when danced by people who know they're meant to be expressing something. Who Cares? looked as though no one cared very much, although Fairchild and Tiler Peck invigorated it. Chaconne and The Four Temperaments were underpowered. It's time to pry Mozartiana away from Wendy Whelan.

Last season, the gimmick was all those full-evening ballets-City Ballet as ABT; this season it was all the premieres, with their attendant architecture. What if the gimmick for the four-week season coming up in September was well-rehearsed and well-coached repertory? I can dream, can't I?

THE BIG NEWS at ABT is rarely repertory, and if there are premieres, they're usually ghastly. Dancers are what ABT is all about. This season the sensation was the Bolshoi's Osipova in her signature role of Don Quixote's Kitri. She was made for it, and it for her. But in the Battle of the Beauties-she and the Royal's wonderful Alina Cojocaru gave one Sleeping Beauty performance each on a frantic Saturday-she came off second best. Not because her spectacular virtues weren't on display, but because Aurora is essentially not her role. She has no trouble with the steps, but the trajectory from joyous innocence to grandeur and mature love is as yet beyond her. Cojocaru's delicacy and classical purity, and her understanding of Aurora, were entrancing. She knows that the notorious Rose Adagio isn't just about holding balances, it's also about how Aurora shyly engages with each suitor; how she lovingly presents the roses to her mother rather than flinging them aside. (This was a Fonteyn specialty. But Fonteyn, too, danced roles for which she wasn't right-Coppélia's Swanilda for one.) Cojocaru is a born Beauty.

The great triumph of the season was Ashton's The Dream, with a dream cast: Gillian Murphy, David Hallberg and Herman Cornejo. Second-cast Marcelo Gomes is a paragon, but he's solid, masculine, direct-he isn't the otherworldly androgynous Oberon Ashton created. All season long, Hallberg, Gomes and Cornejo performed their usual wonders, and Jose Manuel Carreño, another male star of great presence and appeal, was also in superb form. Among the leading men, only Ethan Stiefel was a disappointment-out of whack in Fancy Free and poorly cast in Balanchine's Allegro Brillante. This intense, demanding work, set to Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 3, is Russian classicism at its most imperial; Stiefel, meanwhile, is unyieldingly boyish. On the other hand, Murphy, the company's finest Balanchine dancer, was thrilling opposite him-casually flinging off triple turns and in absolute charge of the music and the vocabulary. She grows in stature from year to year, technically breathtaking and increasingly effective in dramatic roles-she's ABT's Kyra Nichols.

The whole company has been looking terrific, with younger dancers like Simone Messmer, Hee Seo and Cory Stearns making strong impressions. It's also to ABT's credit that it goes on presenting triple bills of consequence-the Ashton program, the American program, the All-Classic Masters program-despite the preference of the Met's summer audiences for multi-act story ballets. Do they notice, I ask myself, the awfulness of the company's Sleeping Beauty production, the inferiority of its Swan Lake, the drippiness of this season's stab at establishing a new full-evening narrative work, the dire Lady of the Camellias? Let's hope that they're too busy being dazzled by all the tremendous dancing.

editorial@observer.com