New York City Ballet with New York City Ballet Orchestra

NYC Ballet, In the Mood To Move You

Getting the atmosphere right in a ballet is as important, and as ticklish, as getting the tone right at a dinner party. It's a subtle alchemy of lighting, decor and the mood of the participants. You know it when you see it, or rather when you feel it.

On Wednesday, when the New York City Ballet danced splendidly from start to finish at the Kennedy Center Opera House, atmosphere is what distinguished the two triumphs -- George Balanchine's "Chaconne" and "Vienna Waltzes" -- from a mediocre Jerome Robbins-Twyla Tharp tug-of-war, "Brahms/Handel."

The Balanchine works could scarcely be more different -- "Chaconne" is spun sugar, "Vienna Waltzes" is a banquet. But in each case, the performances were so engrossing, so full of surprises, that your heart sank when the curtain fell.

"Chaconne," accompanied to music from Gluck's opera "Orphe et Euridice," appears to have a split personality -- the first sections take place in some mysterious, unfixed realm, and the women wear filmy tunics, with their hair loose. Later, the lights brighten and the dancers reappear with hair neatly bound, wearing fitted bodices and short skirts that allude to French court dress. The dancing of the second half is so exuberantly sharp and exacting you might cut yourself on its edges.

Balanchine created the ballet in stages, combining sections he created for an opera production in 1963 with new parts he made in 1976 for the ballet's premiere. I find the stark atmospheric differences make a powerful whole. Particularly in the note-perfect performance led by Wendy Whelan and Philip Neal, this work shows us private and public facets of dancing, and of a relationship.

"Chaconne" opens with a vision of arrested dynamics -- arms upswept, backs arched, as if the dancers were just an exhalation away from taking a step. The dancers' eyes are downcast; they are focused inward. When the ensemble leaves and Whelan and Neal enter to that caressing flute solo, they don't even look at each other. No need for introductions: They know each other implicitly. Of course, the parts are choreographed that way, but it's another thing to see the idea so completely realized, with Whelan and Neal dancing with such intuitive, living familiarity with each other. She whirled away, he materialized at her side. He kept her weightlessly afloat as she used one whiskery leg like a feeler, sensing the air.

The next scene is a shock -- the dancers are glammed up, all smiles, gazing right at us. The atmosphere has shifted to high formality, just as the music describes, and now we can appreciate the public face of dance -- Balanchine has shown us two sides of the coin. It's all spectacle; the buoyant Ask la Cour even plays an air mandolin.

Whelan and Neal are just as spit-shined as everyone else. You'd swear their teeth gleam. It's almost an Odette/Odile distinction -- just as the leading ballerina in "Swan Lake" plays those two mirror-opposite characters, here Balanchine has given us an entire cast that plays two parts. Yet even as Whelan and Neal make plain that they're on display, the level of comfort is still there. It all rests on the intimacy established before. Her phrasing is all deep breaths; she dances right up to the last vibration of the strings. She is in complete command of who she is in this ballet -- of her own atmosphere -- and when he's not dancing, Neal watches her as if in awe. That small detail makes the work live. It's new as it happens.

"Vienna Waltzes" (1977) is also faceted into different realms, each with its own mood. It's a miracle in three-four time: the inventiveness of the steps, the setting that changes from woods -- trees right in the middle of the stage, dancers whirling around them with navigational precision any ship's captain would envy -- to ballroom. After a polka, dramatic swags appear, the trees float away, the lighting glows against mirrors at the back -- a salon materializes with breathtaking finesse for Franz Lehar's "Gold und Silber Walzer" (danced by Jenifer Ringer and Nilas Martins).

But the climax is Richard Strauss's swooning "Der Rosenkavalier," as the set transforms again for Darci Kistler, lit in a pearly, nostalgic light (here, as in "Chaconne," the fine work of designer Mark Stanley). She's deliciously off-kilter -- intentionally -- having had perhaps a bit too much bubbly, and when a full cast in white silk gowns and tuxes joins her, with the music rising crazily, the whole stage seems to be teetering at the brink. Economy in free fall, anyone? This atmosphere socks you in the gut.

"Brahms/Handel" (1984) has no atmosphere. That's not the greatest of its faults -- it's also busily over-embroidered, and this effect only thickens along with the music, an orchestration of Brahms's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. This work is counterpoint run amok. There's a blue group and a green group. Linear formations give way to revolving geometric ones. Some of the dancing is stagebound, some is airborne (literally -- Whelan, replacing Sara Mearns, who was injured earlier in the day, entered standing astride a man's shoulders. After some shaky adjustments of hand positions, she plunged into a group's waiting arms. She looked terrified. Who could blame her?).

The men carry their partners around upside down, quoting ad nauseam a clever move from Robbins's "In the Night." Finally, every creative strategy takes up stage space at once. While it's not the muddle that is Tharp's "Brief Fling," which American Ballet Theatre performed here last month, neither does "Brahms/Handel" flatter either Tharp or Robbins.

Two years after this piece, Tharp created her megahit "In the Upper Room," with its contrapuntal camps appearing out of fog. The path between the two works is clear. Add dry ice to "Brahms/Handel" and you're almost there. Those clashing clusters look better emerging from smoke and slashing lights, and with the stronger concept comes more confident, focused dancing. That's the atmosphere "Brahms/Handel" lacks.