N.Y. CITY BALLET DANCES BALANCHINE

To watch New York City Ballet dance an all-Balanchine program is to be in exactly the right place at precisely the right time. Wagner at Bayreuth is supposed to be like this, and Moliere at the Comedie Francaise, but Balanchine died only three years ago so his creative vision remains potent in the ensemble he honed.

Arguably that vision is embodied at its purest, most concentrated and revolutionary in the three ballets presented Friday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The soulful and mysterious “Serenade” (1934), the brilliant, formal “Symphony in C” (1947) and the forceful, contorted “Agon” (1957) are indispensable achievements of our culture, robbed blind for decades--and different now in costuming, some choreographic details and even style than when they were new--yet still astonishing for their innovations in dance imagery, vocabulary, space.

Balanchine’s first ballet for American dancers, “Serenade” delves deeply into Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings” to suggest a narrative about sisterhood and rivalry, romantic communion and tragic loss.

New York City Ballet danced “Serenade” Friday essentially as a meditation on estrangement, with Merrill Ashley’s tautly reined power in the latecomer/fallen-woman role sharply highlighted against both the supple, grandly dramatic dancing of Valentina Kozlova as the “winged” fate figure and the fleet precision of Kyra Nichols, a solo-projection of the moonstruck women’s corps.

Ashley’s pas de deux with Sean Lavery went far less smoothly than the more complex partnered sequences involving Leonid Koslov later on. The problem seemed to be Ashley’s inability to fully mute her assertive technical prowess--briefly, blazingly evident in her sharp changes of position in air and other solo allegro passages--and move as one with Lavery. Still, “Serenade” represented one of her more successful forays beyond her allegro-technician repertory.

For mass, scale, speed and sheer splendor, the four-part “Symphony in C” (to the composition by Bizet) is surely unsurpassed in 20th-Century dance, yet its celebrated second section holds an adagio duet of consummate sustained flow.

Where other companies have matched steely senior ballerinas against the ballet’s notorious technical rigors, City Ballet emphasized youthful freshness Friday, with Darci Kistler in that second sequence (opposite a devoted Otto Neubert) sweetly luxuriating in every soft, legato phrase--drawing all the steps together like perfectly matched flowers in a bouquet while seemingly lost in some sumptuous dream. Magnificent.

In the opening movement, Lourdes Lopez (sympathetically partnered by Adam Lueders) coupled an almost mechanical exactitude--every repeat of a step identical--to enormous verve and charm. Melinda Roy and Jean-Pierre Frohlich flew through the third movement stylishly, their easy graciousness nearly as remarkable as their buoyancy.

Lauren Hauser and Ulrik Trojaborg led the spectacular finale neatly--and genially--without the hard-edged efficiency that can taint the sense of celebration.

“Agon” isn’t the first or last Balanchine-Stravinsky masterwork, but it may be the most difficult. The relationship to its ostensible source (a 17th-Century French dance manual) can be glimpsed, from time to time, in elegant, isolated flicks of wrist and other gestural/positional artifacts, but the impact of the ballet comes from Balanchine’s ability to reassemble in new combinations the basic components of classicism.

In this sense, “Agon” may be considered a laboratory ballet; the sense of daring experimentation can be intoxicating but the results are often distilled or compressed in the extreme.

The City Ballet cast Friday aimed for maximum thrust and clarity, but some sense of strain intruded. Maria Calegari had an easy authority in her solo and in the trio with Victor Castelli and Peter Frame (both fine). But Heather Watts and Mel A. Tomlinson overcame the inhuman hazards of the duet only with difficulty and former American Ballet Theatre principal Robert La Fosse worked awfully hard at his Sarabande solo. (Unlike his new colleagues, La Fosse anxiously solicits applause immediately at the end of a variation; some ABT habits die hard.)

Robert Irving conducted expertly and the playing remained exemplary. In new casting Saturday afternoon, Nichols and Lavery danced the second duet of “In the Night” with a sure grasp of the technical and expressive nuances, but “Symphony in C” misfired compared to the previous evening.

The first section fell to a vacant Judith Fugate and a clumsy Jock Soto; Ashley and Neubert chopped the second into unrelated effects; Katrina Killian and Gen Horiuchi made the leaping in the third seem gauche stunts; Stacy Cadell and Kipling Houston looked promising but technically uneven in the finale. Gordon Boelzner conducted.