Stars of the 21st Century International Ballet Gala.

STARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY INTERNATIONAL BALLET GALA NEW YORK STATE THEATER, NEW YORK, NY FEBRUARY 14, 2005

High-powered international galas are occasions for the dancer rather than the dance, aren't they? Once in a while in the past you might have found a Baryshnikov offering a Leonid Jacobson miniature jewel like Vestris, but mostly these programs are simply parades of choreographic warhorses, more conducive to watching the mounted rather than the mount.

These one-off dance-rests are more popular in continental Europe than in English-speaking lands. But for the past few years, entrepreneur Solomon Tencer, with his wife, Nadia Veselova-Tencer, as artistic director, has annually brought an all-star gala to New York. And New Yorkers, cultural snobs though we may be, have learned to love them.

Generally speaking, the cornier the dance, the more suitable it is for this kind of program. Lucia Lacarra and her partner, Cyril Pierre (nowadays both with the Munich Ballet and always enormously popular on these programs), danced excerpts from Roland Petit's Carmen (Lacarra is no Zizi Jeanmaire and Pierre does little to help) and La Prisonniere. The results were boring, and little more could be said for the two promising Italian youngsters from the Paris Opera Ballet, Eleonora Abbagnato and Alessio Carbone, performing first another Petit bit, this time from L'Arlesienne, and later appearing in a modernist, and shapeless, Mauro Bigonzetti duet, Kazimir's Colours (which presumably comes from a full-length ballet).

It proved smarter to abide by the tradition of the well-worn and commonplace, which made the presence of the Martha Graham Ensemble opening the second half of the program with "Steps in the Street" (staged by Yuriko from Graham's 1936 work Chronicle) nothing more than a puzzlement. But the familiar--especially if exquisitely or even just excitingly presented--was what paid off.

Although the Kirov pair of Diana Vishneva and Andrian Fadeyev came wildly adrift in Balanchine's "Rubies" duet--he in particular looked as if he were dancing an untidy but intense Albrecht--they both scored very nicely in Leonid Lavrovsky's soaring balcony pas de deux from the original Romeo and Juliet. She in particular is a beautiful dancer who can flutter and be rhapsodic within the heartbeat of single phrase. He's not in that class--or even school.

The Bolshoi's Svetlana Lunkina--another Russian joy--was bereft of her partner, an indisposed Dmitri Gudanov, but her charming, delicately phrased Sylph in Boumonville's second-act duet from La Sylphide was, at short notice, well matched by a stalwart and forthright Guillaume Cote from the National Ballet of Canada. In both the elegiac last-act duet from Giselle and the flamboyant Don Quixote pas de deux, Britain's Royal Ballet pair (and the worthy successors to Sibley and Dowell) of Romanian Alina Cojocaru and Danish Johan Kobborg demonstrated, once and for all, that you don't have to be born into the English style of eloquent but understated elegance to be the pluperfect exemplars of it.

Nor did New York's home teams go unrecognized. Municipal chauvinists could persuasively suggest that the flashiest but also most stylish (now there's a combination for you!) male dancing on show came from Herman Cornejo (who can do 27 impossible things in the air before breakfast) and that supreme machismo powerhouse, Angel Corella. Cornejo partnered a pert and fluent Xiomara Reyes in Vaganova's Diana and Acteon, while Corella was matched with New York City Ballet's Alexandra Ansanelli in the pas de deux from Le Corsaire, doing this kind of thing for the first time and obviously enjoying it.

The program ended with a free-spirited coda by all the dancers (except the Graham contingent) doing this, that, and especially the other, all with happy bravura and to Tchaikovsky. A none-too-serious evening, but great fun.

For more information: www.starsofthe21stcentury.com/events.html

CLIVE BARNES