NEW YORK CITY BALLET COMPANY SHINES WITH NEW WORKS.

NEW YORK CITY BALLET NEW YORK STATE THEATER NEW YORK, NEW YORK NOVEMBER 21, 2000-FEBRUARY 25, 2001

Over the past few years, the Lincoln Center Winter Season of New York City Ballet has fallen, or at least slipped, into a rigid pattern. It starts with a fund-raising gala, then, after a two- or three-day respite, careens into its seasonal orgy of The Nutcracker, finally bouncing into eight weeks of general repertory at the beginning of the new year.

Galas are difficult animals to control. Most of our performing organizations depend on fund-raising galas to help balance their books, but the difficulty, especially for dance companies, is to balance the galas. This year we kicked off with an experimental gala called "Looking at Love," which consisted of giving fifteen scanty excerpts from fourteen ballets. Nearly all of the company's principals and soloists made at least fleeting appearances, and it lasted about seventy-five intermission-less minutes. The unsatisfying program itself seemed a bit of this, a bit of that, and not much of anything.

The Nutcracker, of course, was The Nutcracker. It is, however, used to introduce young dancers to stardom. Thus, 18-year-old Abi Stafford made her first, sparkling appearance as the Sugar Plum Fairy, admirably partnered by soloist Sebastien Marcovici. Another Nutcracker sweetmeat was the reappearance of Igor Zelensky, a principal dancer with City Ballet from 1992 through 1997, partnering another guest artist from the Kirov, prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova, making her City Ballet debut as the Sugar Plum Fairy. The splendid Zelensky performed with assurance, and Zakharova displayed her customary radiance and amplitude.

The season produced three world premieres: Christopher Wheeldon's Polyphonia on January 4, Eliot Feld's Organon on January 23, and Peter Martins's Burleske on February 14. The Wheeldon was very impressive, and seemed more so with subsequent viewings. The title harks back to its composer, Gyogy Ligeti, who once described his orchestral scores as "micropolyphonic." Its eight dancers, dressed in mauve by Holly Hynes and lit with dark mystery by Mark Stanley, are given choreography of sharp musicality and tough grace. The two central duets--for Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto--are sculptural in shape and feel. Elsewhere, suggesting homage to Balanchine's Agon, Wheeldon takes Ligeti's spiky musical phrases and illuminates them with gems of invention, some sequential, some echoing, some inversions of what has gone before, all delivered with characteristic City Ballet flash and flow. There is not a step in Polyphonia that doesn't progress naturally from the step before it. The dance--prickly, angular--moves with the force of nature like the wind. It was handsomely danced by Whelan, Soto, Jennie Somogyi, Edwaard Liang, Jennifer Tinsley, Jason Fowler, Alexandra Ansanelli, and Craig Hall.

Feld's controversial Organon proved a complex mixture of dance, ritual, and architecture. The ballet is set to Bach organ music, played on electronic keyboards geared to duplicate the sound of a traditional pipe organ. The cavernous space of the enlarged State Theater stage challenges Feld's imaginative approach to the baroque. His ensemble is sixty leotard-clad dancers--thirty from the company's corps de ballet, with another thirty advanced students from the School of American Ballet--in addition to his principals, the tireless Damian Woetzel as an Everyman progressing through life's travails, and Maria Kowroski and Charles Askegard performing adagio acrobatics of lingering poetry. With its regimented platoons of dancers offering a ritualized matrix to this organized, organic work, this must be regarded as Feld's most effective tribute to the intricacies and celebrations of the baroque.

The third premiere was of less import. Martins's Burleske, set to Richard Strauss's bouncily Romantic early work Burleske in D Minor for Piano and Orchestra, almost seemed like a Valentine Day's gift to his wife, Darci Kistler, one of the lead dancers. It was a chandelier ballet without chandeliers, a ballroom where the cast seems continually scurrying for cover. Martins has become a supremely professional choreographer, capable of producing a ballet with dazzling expertise even when it seems he's merely filling a gap in the repertory schedule! But such minor pieces are usually also invested with a touch of difference. Here it is when the two main couples, Kistler with Jared Angle and Janie Taylor with Peter Boal, unexpectedly switch partners. It's a small thing, but it lets the curtain fall on a question mark rather than a coda.

Fascinatingly, the extraordinary dancing at City Ballet had been virtually foretold by the equally extraordinary young dancers emerging from the School of American Ballet. As a result, despite many injuries and sickness sidelining key dancers, performances this season generally have been superlative--there are few performing arts organizations in the world maintaining such high and consistent standards. This is especially remarkable since few of the dancers ever saw company founder George Balanchine, who died before many of them were born.

The company maintains a revolving permanent repertoire from season to season, but the only really surprising revival, after eight years, was of Balanchine's Variations Pour une Porte et un Soupir. Admittedly, this tired piece of avant-garderie, obviously but not sufficiently influenced by Maurice Bejart, has a certain flamboyant theatricality. Set to outdated musique concrete by Pierre Henry, this duet for (literally) a creaking Door, played by Helene Alexopoulos, in a voluminous, stage-embracing black skirt and Louise Brooks-style bangs, and (literally) a wheezing Sigh, played like a wilting ghost by Tom Gold, is not one of Balanchine's classics.

Yet the Balanchine spirit still runs strong in performances of his own ballets. These included a sprightly revival of La Source with Boal and Jenifer Ringer, making her exultant debut, while a poetic yet ironic Scotch Symphony was led by Kyra Nichols and Askegard. There was also a surprisingly luminous performance of the sometimes dull Kammermusik No. 2, lit by glorious debuts from Kowroski and Monique Meunier. Other role debuts came from both the long-legged Kowroski and the sultry Alexopoulos as the Striptease Girl in Balanchine's Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. Their mocking, svelte sexiness made even this pallid romp almost bearably romplike. There was also a rhapsodic revival of La Valse, starring a doomswept Kistler, and an exquisitely judged performance of Baiser de la Fee, led by Margaret Tracey and an immaculate Boal, who has enjoyed his best season yet.

Robbins's intricately devised ballet to silence, Moves, has also been revived with dedicated precision, and his Afternoon of a Faun has found fresh young exponents in Ansanelli and Marcovici. The cool mathematical playfulness of one of his last works, 2 & 3 Part Inventions, for eight young dancers gently articulating Bach's fugue, was led by a delightful Ansanelli and Benjamin Millepied, and went like a song. Millepied came off well, leading the autumnal bacchanal in the finale of The Four Seasons, in which Adam Hendrickson dazzled as Pan. Robbins's more serious mood emerged in his elegiac ballet to Alban Berg's violin concerto In Memory Of ... with the leading role exquisitely alternated by Nichols and Kistler.

Martins's delicatessen of a duet, Zakouski, was beautifully restaged for Tracey and a newcomer to the role, Millepied. Another splendid Martins piece, the rewardingly complex Harmonielehre, also came up springtime fresh this winter, while his Slonimsky's Earbox had a zippy rendering led by Woetzel. Helgi Tomasson's swift and brilliant symphonic ballet Prism, like Harmonielehre, was a glittering addition to the repertoire from last year's Diamond Project.

Finally, and briefly, be sure to look for three brilliant new up-and-comers in the company: the high-jumping Ashley Bouder, the elegant Andrew Veyette and, still an apprentice, the effervescent Daniel Ulbricht.