NEW WORKS BY MARTINS, GLASS : NEW YORK CITY BALLET LOOKS TO THE FUTURE

The New York City Ballet has spent a lot of time this week at the Orange County Performing Arts Center looking backward. With a resident ghost as potent as George Balanchine, that is as it must be.

Saturday night, however, the company looked forward. It wasn’t a particularly promising look.

The best part of the performance came first--and it involved nothing more novel than a repetition of Balanchine’s definitive Stravinsky translation: “Symphony in Three Movements” (1972).

Maria Calegari and Bart Cook made the central pas de deux lighter, more playful, more lyrical than it had been on opening night when Heather Watts and Jock Soto were the tough-edged protagonists. Nevertheless, the perky charm, the quirky patterns and the raw energy continued to exert their special appeal.

Nuances may change from cast to cast, but the wonder of Balanchine’s inventive vocabulary and the aptness of his musical images remain constant.

One would love to be able to muster comparable enthusiasm for “Songs of the Auvergne,” a major effort by Balanchine’s official successor, Peter Martins.

Martins was a leading Balanchine danseur long enough to absorb the superficial essentials of the master’s craft. That does not mean, unfortunately, that he can approach the master’s art.

The new “Songs,” first performed in New York last February, are not original enough to declare Martins’ independence. Nor are they sufficiently refined or dramatic to assert second-hand compulsion.

They are merely pretty, sweet and insipid. They also are slick and sentimental. They go on a long time even though nothing much happens. They exalt pastel kitsch.

The curtain rises to disclose a hazy all-purpose mountain-panorama painted on the back-cloth by Alain Vaes. It looks like a cheap postcard.

On wanders a woman in folk finery. We expect her to dance, but, mirabile dictu , she sings. It is Karen Hunt, and she sings the marvelous Canteloube settings in sophisticated, gleaming tones, so long as the tessitura does not dip too low.

Soon a minicorps of darling children traipses on. That is always a dangerous sign.

The kiddies skip and prance, lounge about the bucolic floor, drape themselves around the person described by a friendly wag as the village soprano.

Eventually the misplaced diva retires to a stool and music stand at the side of the stage, leaving the inaction to the pleasant peasants.

The pleasant peasants do a lot of patently exuberant hippety-hopping, sometimes in the manner of Bournonville, sometimes in the manner of watered-down Balanchine and sometimes in the manner of ballet class.

Martins contrives little dramas amid the pastoral rituals. The children come and go. Heather Watts and Jock Soto indulge in some romantic interplay.

She tries to look frail, innocent and potentially maternal. He remains ardent and manly and, in one potentially unsettling moment, shoos away the kiddies so he can be alone with the ballerina.

There is a lot of smiling, a lot of preening, a lot of rhapsodic coming and going. It is all bathed in molasses.

Finally, the soprano repeats her entrance aria, exits slowly the way she came, and the curtain falls amid the accumulated goo.

The company goes about this sticky business with undeterred eloquence. Still, it remains a waste of energy.

No energy is wasted in Jerome Robbins’ “Glass Pieces,” which pretend to celebrate the minimalist chic of 1983. The problem here involves a quaint mismatch between the dance and the music.

Like it or lump it (this ingrate lumps it), Philip Glass’ music exerts its primitive appeal through dogged repetition of tiny melodic patterns. Glass does not develop themes or tell stories or explore subtleties of affect. He blares, bludgeons and glorifies the simple-minded arpeggio.

Robbins is too sophisticated for all that. Even when he wants to restrain his expressive impulses, he hints at narrative meaning, creates complex and even poignant networks of movement, invents striking contrapuntal impulses.

For better of worse, Lucinda Childs and Laura Dean have approached minimalist music with stubborn beat-em-over-the-head, xerox-the-phrase choreography. Robbins isn’t mod, much less post-mod. He can’t ignore his classical roots.

He sets his dances in an urban maze (Ronald Bates provided the graph-paper backdrop) and propels his dancers through busy mass maneuvers. He doesn’t sustain the frigidity of his presumably impersonal inspiration, however, and even permits Loudes Lopez and Adam Lueders the languid luxury of a love duet in the middle of the mechanical sprawl.

The “Glass Pieces” are engaging, in spite of their dubious sonic source. Moreover, they are marvelously danced.

Hugo Fiorito and the half-imported orchestra provided appreciative accompaniments throughout. In the Canteloube, incidentally, the Segerstrom Hall acoustic favored the instruments in the deep, deep pit over the lone voice on the stage.