A Four-Work Leap Into the Forefront of Classical Ballet

On Wednesday evening, New York City Ballet, in a quadruple bill of works choreographed to Tchaikovsky music by its co-founder George Balanchine, and plunging its audience into the quintessence of classical ballet, strongly suggested that it has again become the world’s foremost ballet company. And perhaps the best news is that the troupe’s orchestra, led on this occasion by Clotilde Otranto, played the Tchaikovsky scores with a greater tonal beauty and eloquence of phrasing than I have heard from it. These scores are familiar, but the evening had moments when phrases seized the heart anew.

At City Ballet, Tchaikovsky is spelled Tschaikovsky. The reasoning is good; that’s how the composer spelled it when he visited New York in 1891. The four scores in this program, which recurs in repertory through Oct. 19, were composed from 1877 to 1887: the Serenade for Strings; the pas de deux music created for the second cast of the original “Swan Lake”; and the third and fourth orchestral suites. In those few years Tchaikovsky established in depth and breadth the dance elements that he so often made fundamental to his music.

Balanchine was by no means the first to make ballets to Tchaikovsky’s concert music, but throughout his long career he returned to Tchaikovsky scores, often reworking or supplementing pieces he had made before. Wednesday’s ballets were “Serenade” (a 1934 piece that he revised up to the last years of his life), “Mozartiana” (his 1981 version of a score he had choreographed several times before), “Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux” (1960) and “Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3” (a 1970 work reaching its climax in its “Theme and Variations” final movement, which he had choreographed in 1947). In these four pieces, Balanchine redefined the Romantic-classical quintessence of ballet: chivalrous, fervent and sparkling.

There are five companies with outstandingly strong and influential classical styles in ballet: the Mariinsky of St. Petersburg, the Bolshoi of Moscow, the Royal Danes of Copenhagen, the Royal of London and City Ballet. I’ve watched four of these this year, and from 2009 to 2011 watched the fifth, the Royal Danes, in three cities; none of them are in ideal shape. But Wednesday night’s performance, like many this year, showed that City Ballet’s classical dancing is gorgeously alive — above all in terms of dance musicality — and that it is doing more to honor its heritage than any of those other troupes.

A supplementary virtue is that it also has the best track record of any company this century for important choreographic premieres — but, as most of the 21st-century choreography in Tuesday’s opening-night gala showed, this area is more perilous. Most ballets that night showed how their choreographers could work only within the blandly sexist formulas of older classical ballet. But the four Balanchine-Tchaikovsky pieces on Wednesday took us into the living heart of ballet’s orthodoxy.

You can criticize aspects of the Balanchine style: the insistent frontality; the pre-eminence of women and the presentation of men as their squires; the far greater attention to ceremony and male-female love than to matters of companionship and community; and even features of its celebrated musicality. But no ballet choreographer has ever left the world with so impressive, diverse and influential a body of work.

“Serenade” — surely the most miraculous of all ballets — amazed again, with the corps de ballet borne on the music and with gloriously individual central performances by Sara Mearns, Sterling Hyltin and Teresa Reichlen. This ballet contains so much: the way it says individual lives pass, but the ballet academy endures; the fleeting images of grief, love, loss and death; the consolatory support that the group gives to individuals; and the extraordinary transcendence. Ms. Mearns and Ms. Hyltin were often breathtaking: generous, expansive, urgent.

Whereas the heroine of “Serenade” gradually attains an exalted condition, apparently addressing the numinous, the prima of “Mozartiana” starts out that way. Yet “Mozartiana” takes us in the opposite direction, back into the mortal world and into sublime humor. It was heartening to see Maria Kowroski dance this role with new flair. Although she doesn’t have the technical resources to play with her music and to make wit from the deliberately unorthodox strokes that embellish the solo variations in the “Thème et Variations” finale, her quietly spectacular beauty on this occasion cast a spell.

Tyler Angle’s elegant charm does much to help the chief male role of “Mozartiana,” but he makes its dance accents conventional, even glib; Daniel Ulbricht, despite his smart timing, cannot show the (very elusive) musical point of the Gigue solo. Perhaps the best news here was that the long Menuet for four women, which so often proves tedious, was alive with enthusiastic freshness.

The whole performance suggested that City Ballet’s women are reaching new peaks of ardor, sweep and playfully expansive authority. The blaze of Ashley Bouder’s dancing in the “Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux” was wonderfully multifaceted: the astonishing impetus she achieved in top-speed passages had touches of swagger and amusement. As her partner, Gonzalo Garcia, most of whose Balanchine dancing with City Ballet has been tepid, showed incisiveness and glee.

Rebecca Krohn distinguished the opening Élégie of “Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3” with fervor; and in the final “Tema con Variazioni” (why did Tchaikovsky use French and Italian on different occasions for the same musical construction?), Tiler Peck and Joaquin De Luz danced with supreme virtuosity. This finale is grander than these two remarkable dancers: There is something too collected about Ms. Peck’s dazzling way of playing with time, and Mr. De Luz’s phrasing flattens some dynamic contrasts. But the technical level of both was so high that I feel guilty making cavils. It’s exciting to contemplate the season that lies ahead.