New York City Ballet.

NEW YORK CITY BALLET NEW YORK STATE THEATER, LINCOLN CENTER, NYC JANUARY 3-FEBRUARY 26, 2006

Most ballet companies take a sabbatical after The Nutcracker. But like the metropolis it represents, New York City Ballet never wastes a moment. Without batting a false eyelash, the company proceeded directly into its winter season. Featuring two world premieres, the repertoire included several revivals, a run of Peter Martins' Swan Lake, and notable performance debuts.

Any premiere by City Ballet's resident choreographer, Christopher Wheeldon, stirs up expectations and publicity, and rightfully so. He's demonstrated an impressive track record with his versatility, creativity, and craftsmanship. Wheeldon doesn't shy away from formidable musical challenges--in this case a movement from Beethoven's Sonata in B-flat Major, Op. 106 ("Hammerklavier'). To the choreographer's credit, his new ballet, Klavier, drums up a lot of the angst and ecstasy implicit in the score.

As the curtain rises on Klavier, a grounded chandelier upstage telegraphs an undercurrent of restlessness as the dancers pace upstage and downstage. The subsequent pianissimo passages sort out the groupings of the 10 dancers, including principal couples Miranda Weese and Albert Evans, and Wendy Whelan and Sebastien Marcovici. Weese dances with feminine abandon, but this is ultimately Whelan's show. Marcovici acts like a lightning rod to Whelan's emotional electricity. When she slides across the stage on pointe, it's as if Beethoven himself were slashing out a staff of music in frustration. As the music builds, Whelan translates into physical geometry the essence of a nervous breakdown. The duet reaches a denouement when she stops in an obliquely angled arabesque, face-down in resignation and resolution. The same arabesque is repeated by the other women, an act of empathetic recognition, and the ballet ends with the pacing movements of the opening.

Because the group sections lack urgency when Whelan is offstage, the sum total of Klavier doesn't place it at the top of the Wheeldon canon. But any Wheeldon/Whelan collaboration means dance history in the making; she is his greatest muse. (Further proof lay in season performances of After the Rain and Liturgy.)

The title of Peter Martins' new ballet Friandises means "tidbits" in French, and the choreographer approached Christopher Rouse's commissioned score in five movements as if the music were to be sampled like appetizers. Martins, obviously enamored of the young talent in the company, wanted to showcase them. But the first four sections lack a viewpoint, despite Rouse's witty score. (The composer echoes bits of everything from The Rite of Spring to a French can-can.) The last movement provides the raison d'etre for the bal let--a vehicle for wunderkinds Tiler Peck and Daniel Ulbricht.

Dancing to a rousing gallop, Ulbricht zooms around the stage at NASGAR speed, accelerating into triple saut de basques. And Peek tosses off triple fouettes with alternating multiple back and front attitude turns. It's a trickster's arena, but Martins seems truly inspired by the brisk tempo. Like his ballets choreographed to the pulsing scores of John Adams prove, Martins works best at top speed; the tempo seems to occupy his mind and stimulate his creativity, letting him use the full expanse of the stage.

Swan Lake brought a fresh wave of debuts, which focused the attention on the dancing rather than the oddly scribbled sets by Danish designer Per Kirkeby and the weakly developed themes of the production. Jenifer Ringer, partnered by Marcovici as her soulful Prince, offered a thoroughly balanced, intelligent portrayal of Odette/Odile. Often reminiscent of Margot Fonteyn, she stressed the human pain and classicism of the role. A phenomenal allegro dancer, Ashley Bouder confused Odette with the Firebird, causing her to channel her energy haphazardly. When in doubt, Bouder relies on an overuse of her head and a coy manner. She deserves better coaching.

A corps dancer who had rarely seen a spotlight, Sara Mearns danced a surprisingly composed Odette with a pleasant Russianized style. But her lack of experience and stamina forced her to run out of gas in the Black Swan pas de deux, resulting in a fizzled coda. But stay tuned--she's talented. On the other hand, from her first jete entrance, it's clear that Sofiane Sylve is the Swan Queen. You know why the other swans elected her to be monarch, because she's the biggest, the best, and can outbalance any of them. Sylve's plush movement quality buffers the strength she displays, and her expressivity stems from full physicality with no strain involved. In the end, she drew a sharp distinction between Odette and Odile.

Time tells a lot about the durability of revivals. Some of Jerome Robbins' ballets, like New York Export: Opus Jazz, seem revelatory in retrospect. Mother Goose, with its tepid drama and thin choreography, looks more like a cutesy experiment better left in the attic. Conversely, Wheeldon's lovely Scenes de Ballet, created by the novice choreographer in 1999 for students of the School of American Ballet, lends a new context to the choreographer's career. Built on the ingenious premise of a diagonally bisected stage that serves as a mirrored studio and a young student's looking glass into a fantasy world of ballerina-land, Wheeldon demonstrated from the start that he possesses imagination, vocabulary, and musicality. And the marvelously polished dancing of the SAB students (rehearsed by Olga Kostritzky and Garielle Whittle) put to shame the poorly rehearsed and miscast company production of the Balanchine masterwork Episodes.

In other casting news, Megan Fairchild danced with a sweet soubrette quality in Ballo della Regina rather than with the required attack and regality. The pomp and circumstance went instead to her partner, Joaquin De Luz, with his virile presence and endlessly resilient jumps. Sylve made an indelible mark in her debuts in the adagio of Symphony in C and in Allegro Brillante. In the latter, she was a gale force, answering Tchaikovsky's arpeggios with quadruple pirouettes and the fortissimos with yard-high pas de chats.

New York City Ballet is blessed with ballerinas of the caliber of Sylve and Whelan and with a fine repertory stock. But be warned: It always pays to check both the programming and the casting. See www.nycballet.com.