DANCE TRIUMPH : RETURN OF THE NEW N.Y. CITY BALLET

When the wondrous New York City Ballet last appeared in the vicinity--12 too-long years ago--Los Angeles still languished in the balletic dark ages.

The city tended to regard large-scale classical dance, apart from a borrowed “Swan Lake” here and a packaged “Giselle” there, as a sporadic frill. The only venue available to George Balanchine and his company was the rather dismal and emphatically limiting Greek Theatre. Much had to be taken on faith.

Wednesday night promised something of a dawning. The New York City Ballet wasn’t just back at last. It was back ensconced at last in a worthy, luxurious, receptive showplace: Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The new New York City Ballet--directed, for most practical purposes, by Peter Martins--isn’t exactly the same company we saw under those awful conditions in 1974. Nor does the full ensemble bear more than a flashing resemblance to those Stars-of-NYCB troupes (or were they scars -of-NYCB?) that occasionally passed through town to tease our poor, deprived, and possibly depraved sensibilities.

If one can make valid judgments on the basis of a single performance, the City Ballet seems to have lost a little in unison suavity, gained a little in cheeky pizazz. The women are as sensuous and compelling as ever. The men may be more forceful, and they certainly are more prominent.

In any case, the company has retained its extraordinary strength in depth, its cultivation of individuality even in mass maneuvers, its sleek and shiny virtuosity, its pervasive grandeur and, perhaps most gratifying, its unique and unerring respect for the musical impulse.

The presumably benign ghost of Mr. B lingers, as it should and as it must. Still, one doesn’t feel the company has been turned into a shrine or a museum.

Even in an introductory program that was primarily devoted to honoring the past, one had to notice new expressive indulgences amid the supposed abstraction, subtle--and not so subtle--shifts in stylistic focus. Mr. B would, no doubt, have wanted it no other way. He never encouraged artistic stagnation.

The evening opened with “Symphony in Three Movements,” Balanchine’s peppery and poignant ode to Igor Stravinsky anno 1972. It is a symphony in three leotarded colors--white, black and central pink--a symphony built on jagged lines, propulsive motion and quirky contrapuntal ritual.

When it was new, the City Ballet stressed the primitive passions in the work. Today, a rather shaky beginning notwithstanding, the performance seems more playful and no less affecting.

The diagonal line-up of semi-frenzied women in pony-tails that provides the first image used to suggest Amazonian brutality. Wednesday it flirted with girls-next-door gentility. Still, the impact was compelling.

A willowy Heather Watts and a weighty Jock Soto sustained erotic innuendo amid the sometimes mechanical, always magnetic intricacies of the principal duet.

In the multi-layered complexities of the finale, the six principals, assorted demi-soloists and corps somehow sustained convulsive energy without slighting the inherent jazzy accents. They created a daring, tense fusion of the cold and the hot, the urgent and the nonchalant, the abstract and the specific. It was terrific.

Performed with muted brilliance by Merrill Ashley and Adam Lueders, Balanchine’s ancient ‘Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux”(1960) reminded us that the best circus acts are elegant.

The program was to have included a third sample of the master’s oeuvre, “Tzigane,” but this had to be sacrificed when Suzanne Farrell sustained an injury. Certain dancers in this company own certain ballets.

In its place came a happy surprise and some more Stravinskian perk: Peter Martins’ own “Eight More”(1985). A companion piece to the feminine-oriented “Eight Easy Pieces,” it is a neat yet frisky showpiece for three danseurs who constantly, unabashedly, pause to gaze and gauge.

An anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-higher-and-faster-and-wilder orgy, it is crisp, clever and eminently well-controlled. It bears traces of Twyla Tharp as well as Balanchine as it casts an archetypal flying imp, Gen Horiuchi, as bravura-comic foil for a nicely unmatched pair of youthful straight men: Peter Boal and Michael Byars.

The evening closed with an obligatory bow to the “other” genius of the New York City Ballet, Jerome Robbins. His “Four Seasons” (1979) is an affectionate, delicate satire of the grand ballet divertissement as it held up the central action in grand Italianate opera.

The music in this case is the magnificently tawdry hippety-hop interpolation Verdi devised for “Les Vepres Siciliennes,” augmented with comparably obscure snippets from “I Lombardi” and “Trovatore.”

Robbins seizes both music and convention to create an ornate panorama of lofty cliches.

Wednesday night, Alexandre Proia preened haughtily as the master of ceremonies, Janus. Baby ballerinas in white tutus shivered with intricate precision in stylized snow flutters. Kyra Nichols and Ib Andersen flitted delicately through the pastel joys of spring. Stephanie Saland and Robert La Fosse exulted in the torrid and florid excesses of summer.

Best of all, the exquisite, long-limbed Maria Calegari joined the muscular Sean Lavery in a bizarre celebration of Soviet mock-bucolic bravura on behalf of fall. Lavery holds his own decently, it should be noted, in a role designed for Baryshnikov and Martins.

In the autumnal finale, a perpetually fauning Horiuchi provided delirious speed-demon counterpoint.

Ah, the lavish decadence of it all!

INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE:

1--Robert Irving and an excellent orchestra (partly imported, partly domestic) provided model accompaniments in the pit, which the Segerstrom acoustic happens to favor with exceptional clarity and resonance.

2--The hyper-enthusiastic Orange County public has now been chastised in the program magazine, in live mid-concert announcements, in gestures by performing artists and in at least four newspapers (even the Register) for applauding in the wrong places. Wednesday the audience applauded in the right places.