New York City Ballet.

The New York City Ballet's inestimable heritage of Balanchine works and its intensive schedule -- seven performances a week, each one a different mix drawn from a selection of works (forty-eight this season) -- are so much part of this company's identity as to usually pass without a great deal of comment. But watcking an NYCB season after being accustomed to the leisurely, sequential programs of European companies, where a single ballet or mixed bill might run for weeks, is to be acutely reminded of just how unique an enterprise this company is.

An enterprise that creates a world where the sublimely spacious abstraction of Concerto Barocco borders the edgy, strange forces of Symphony in Three Movements, the chunky modernist shapes of Kammermusik No. 2, or the brief, delicate grace of Sonotine. Where Jerome Robbins's nostalgia-inducing I'm Old Foshioned, or Balanchine's robust Western Symphony and spirited Who Cores? marry popular music to high art, and where nineteenth-century ballets like Swan Lake and Coppelia sit sturdily next to Apollo and Ago -- works whose extension of technique and style mark Balanchine's movement beyond the norms embodied in these earlier pieces.

Watching a full season for the first time, I was struck by how extraordinary is this range, and how large the technical and artistic demands made on both dancers and musicians: Balanchine seem. not only to have extended the range of the ballet vocabulary, but also to have enlarged and deepened already-formed genres in such works as Symphony in C, Cortege Hongrois, and Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux. And while ballets by Jerome Robbins and Peter Martins (whose pieces make up most of the rest of the repertory) are less multidimensional, their respective demands on the dancers nonetheless require impressive levels of technical skill and concentration.

These qualities were certainly in evidence during the winter season, particularly during its most newsworthy event: the premiere of Robbins's Brandenburg. Set to J.S. Bach's third Brandenburg Concerto and sections from the second, first, and sixth concerti, the new ballet opens with eight couples, in diamond formation, bobbing in plie before trios peel away, then coalescing into new shapes (circles, squares, diagonals). Wendy Whelan and Peter Boal arrive to dance brilliantly before and with this pretty crowd (in color-banded costumes by Holly Hynes) and are followed by an enigmatic second pas de deux, beautifully performed by Lourdes Lopez and Nikolaj Hubbe.

Moving with slow deliberation, they dance apart yet in relation to one another, making geometric patterns of isolation -- Lopez's a terre arabesque mirrors Hubbe's battement devant; their hands circle just inches apart; the air between them appears thick and weighty. When they finally touch, the event is anticlimactic and their relationship still unresolved, they part with formal, melancholy dignity.

A final, fourth, section restores the bouncy adolescent gaiety of the earlier part, and even brings Lopez and Hubbe on to join in the final frolics -- but the work seems less interesting for its determinedly resolved finale.

Brandenburg is recognizably part of the Robbins ballet univers -- full of safisfyingly complex patterns, clever dance ideas, and appealing, musical responses -- and it is a masterly work in its own vein. This is, however, a much narrower vein than that explored by Balanchine: Robbins delineates a world that has very precise frontiers, over which -- he makes it very clear -- he (and we, the audience) are not to venture. Part of the great pleasure of seeing Balanchine's works in juxtaposition throughout a season is to realize how he opens up the world of imagined experience, so that getting to know one piece is to be better prepared to see others.

Observing a season as a whole is also to understand different facets of dancers who are attempting to explore new territories. In the central pas de deux of Symphony in Three Movements, Miranda Weese exhibited dazzling qualities of fearless excess that spilled over into newly authoritative performances in the ballerina roles that are a conventional fit for her willowy grace. Monique Meunier's deliciously flashy showgirl in Western Symphony and powerful control in Agon showed the wonderful extravagance of her dancing. And Nichol Hlinka's humor, refinement, and precision in Coppelia and Scotch Symphony somehow disguised her virtuosity, evident only as a sublime three-dimensionality in space.

Other dancers also stood out throughout the season: Paris Opera Ballet etoile Isabelle Guerin, whose guest appearances in Other Dances, The Concert, and Swan Lake showed her beautifully schooled dancing and assured presence; Whelan, who demonstrated technical command and passionate commitment to her huge range of roles; Damian Woetzel, with his sunny genius; new kids on the block Peter Hansen, Benjamin Millepied, and the coltish Alexandra Ansanelli, who had exciting solo debuts. But, in the end, the range and sweep of the ballets seems a larger affair than individual dancers. Despite Balanchine's injunction that his works disappear when he did, it seems clear that they are not about to do so.