What would Balanchine say? New York City Ballet, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

It’s been 16 years since New York City Ballet appeared in London, and its too-brief visit to Sadler’s Wells offered a welcome chance to encounter a previously unseen range of repertory and personnel. Perhaps the company can never be what it was when I first saw it as a youngster – its founder George Balanchine still in charge, the likes of Suzanne Farrell and Edward Villella in their prime – but one cannot live off misty memories and what has emerged now certainly has living, evolving force.

Yet the evening’s highlight for me had to be its ‘heritage’ element – the exquisite performance by Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley of Balanchine’s mysteriously beautiful miniature Duo Concertant from 1972. Two dancers stand behind a pianist and violinist playing a suite by Stravinsky. They scarcely move at first: they are listeners, waiting for the spirit to descend. And when it does, they seem to be friends wittily improvising rather than lovers absorbed in a romantic pas de deux. Then for the final section Balanchine springs a complete emotional volte-face – the stage suddenly plunged into darkness, the dancers left in intense spotlit isolation, their disembodied hands reaching across the void in an attempt to find something irretrievably lost or yearned for. The effect is electrifying and strangely moving.

Of the three new pieces, by far the most impressive was Pam Tanowitz’s austerely elegant Gustave le Gray No. 1, in which four priestly figures in voluminous scarlet robes seem to take control of the music to the point of comically propelling the piano and pianist across the stage. This may sound banal, but Tanowitz’s choreographic imagination is inexhaustibly inventive and her intentions are subtle. Justin Peck’s Rotunda was a pleasant but unremarkable opener that puts a lively band of dancers in leisurewear through some gymnastic paces.