New York City Ballet, April 23, 2017

The program on Sunday night of three ballets by George Balanchine effectively captured the extreme range of his ballets, from the classical Allegro Brillante, to the austerely ritualistic The Four Temperaments to the extravagant Symphony in C.

Allegro Brillant was originally done on Maria Tallchief in 1956 and is purely classical pure dance, with solos and pas de deux for the two leads --Tiler Peck and Andrew Veyette -- as well as parts for four women and four men, all to Tschaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 3.  Balanchine uses much of the classical vocabulary, especially variations on the tour jete, to propel the dancing forward with the music.

The Four Temperaments is performed to a score that Balanchine commissioned from Hindemith in 1940; the ballet was first performed in 1946.  There is no attempt to literally interpret choleric, melancholic,  sanguine and phlegmatic temperaments (I tried to do so when I first saw the ballet years ago), rather the Greek and medieval ideas are incorporated into the movement, giving it a powerfully ritualistic quality.  There are only so many steps in classical ballet but Balanchine uses them in unusual ways, with a special emphasis on the grand battement en balancoire in The Four Temperaments, using the familiar steps in new ways.

Symphony in C, first performed in 1947 to the music of Bizet, was one of the first Balanchine ballets I saw, when I was a student at Columbia in 1970.  I have seen it many times since and, like most Balanchine ballets, it never fails to show me things I have not seen or noticed before.  Unfortunately Balanchine is no longer around to make changes in his ballets to account for the idiosyncracies of each new dancer, but the adagio in Symphony in C is still, as Arlene Croce said, "the most privileged role in the Balanchine repertory" and it was beautifully danced by Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle, who supported Kowroski as she softly fell backwards into his arms.

These three ballets are so closely entwined with the music, almost as if the steps are between the notes, that one can't hear the music separately without visualizing the steps Balanchine choreographed.  And each ballet is elegantly structured, with solos, pas de deux and ensemble dancing that build to extraordinary finales.