DANCE REVIEW : Dancers’ Skills in the Spotlight at Balanchine Fest Finale : City Ballet and guest performers prove his works can still dazzle--if the casting is right.

The classical, lyrical nature of George Balanchine’s ballet theater persisted throughout the eight-week, 73-work Balanchine Celebration performed by New York City Ballet. Sometimes this timeless and delicate dimension held firm with glorious dancing. Other times it clung tenuously alongside misguided and misshapen efforts.

The very ambitious affair came to a grandiose close on Sunday with “Dinner With Balanchine,” a nearly seven-hour marathon of ballet excerpts and food-filled intermissions. Though the event included the appearances by 10 mostly impressive guest dancers from companies here and abroad, it amounted to little more than a provocative footnote to the Celebration overall.

The final three weeks of the season’s chronologically arranged repertory included more than two dozen works from the last decade of Balanchine’s career, which ended with his death in 1983. Of key interest here were the 1972 Divertimento from “Baiser de la Fee” (to Stravinsky) and the 1980 “Robert Schumann’s Davidsbundlertanze” (to Schumann).

The earlier work occasioned the season’s most exciting performance by a newcomer in an existing role.

As the young man in this narrative-scented work based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ice Maiden,” Nikolaj Hubbe (a 25-year-old recruit from Denmark’s Royal Ballet) plumbed great depths. His palpable eagerness, his caring partnering (of an accomplished Judith Fugate as the ballerina/bride) and his pungent dancing showed how an inspired young dancer can mine and illuminate a Balanchine role sometimes seen as frozen in the career of its original cast (Helgi Tomasson, in this case).

“Davidsbundlertanze,” dating from the twilight of Balanchine’s career, has always had added resonance. Its mood of the illusive loves and the dark departure of an artist gave rise to various autobiographical interpretations regarding Balanchine’s thoughts about death.

Whoever the central artist represents--portrayed here with compelling agitation by Adam Luders, the role’s originator--the ballet’s quartet of couples makes its changeable effects by musically nuanced dancing rather than overt acting. This lyrically dramatic tone was sustained by the current cast, even while some (notably Maria Calegari in Suzanne Farrell’s original part and Heather Watts in her own part) could not ultimately articulate all of the choreography’s complexity.

These two microcosms and the one-time-only appearances of the guest dancers on closing night help point to some general observations about Balanchine and today’s City Ballet.

Hubbe’s “Baiser” performance proved how suitably gifted dancers today, even those far removed from firsthand experience with Balanchine, can still bring glory upon themselves as well as Balanchine’s choreography.

Other examples, however, such as Nilas Martins (son of City Ballet director Peter Martins) in almost all the Balanchine leads he assumed, show how ineffective these works can become from listless performance and careless casting.

The Schumann work revealed how much Balanchine’s art depends on simplicity of presentation and precise musicality. Other works, “Duo Concertante,” “Stravinsky Violin Concerto,” “Kammermusik No. 2,” to name but three, demonstrated how a lack of theatrical tone can be as debilitating as a lack of physical tone.

The presence of guest artists, especially the young ballerinas, among City Ballet’s ranks for the climactic performance put a strong and not especially encouraging light on the company’s Balanchine future.

Beyond a desire to present Balanchine’s works to a public interested in seeing them, which was amply demonstrated by this event, a company must have a variety of ballerinas to bring such a program to life.

Except for 35-year-old Kyra Nichols, who danced stirringly in the lead role of “Walpurgisnacht Ballet” and serenely in “Vienna Waltzes,” none of the other City Ballet ballerinas on this special occasion produced the excitement of performance and the expertise of ballet dancing that the younger guest ballerinas did.

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The overwhelming and deserved ovation of the closing went to Darcey Bussell of Britain’s Royal Ballet for her ecstatic rendering of the pas de deux from “Agon.” Near-equal finesse and impact came from Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Patricia Barker, the Kirov Ballet’s Zhanna Ayupova (both in “Apollo”) and San Francisco Ballet’s Elizabeth Loscavio (in “Who Cares?”).

Twenty-one-year City Ballet veteran Stephanie Saland won an especially warm and sentimental ovation after “Vienna Waltzes.” Insiders knew this marked the farewell New York performance for this ballerina, whom Balanchine hired in 1972.

City Ballet will ever be the “source” of Balanchine, but unless it can produce a steady stream of accomplished dancers, especially ballerinas, the source will remain more theoretical than actual.