Captivated by the moody and mysterious world of Ravel’s La Valse, a young woman waltzes through Balanchine’s surging choreography with tragic results.

"We are dancing on the edge of a volcano," Maurice Ravel wrote in his notes to La Valse. His words are an apt description of both the music and Balanchine's neo-romantic choreography: couples waltzing in a cavernous ballroom where a woman in white is at once horrified and fascinated by the uninvited figure of death.

Intrigued by the disintegration of the waltz form, Ravel envisioned La Valse set in the Imperial Court of Vienna in 1855, and called the score "a choreographic poem … a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz … the mad whirl of some fantastic and fateful carousel."

Serge Diaghilev commissioned the score for his Ballets Russes, but rejected it for being "untheatrical." When Balanchine created La Valse in 1951, he found the score to be too short and preceded it with Ravel's Valse Nobles et Sentimentales, eight short waltzes, which establish the mood of the ballet — a mood of superficial gaiety mixed with an uncertain feeling of impending catastrophe.

Other Dances pays homage to Chopin’s romanticism and the purity of classical ballet technique, featuring two dramatic dancers in a series of short, folk-infused dances.

Jerome Robbins was a great admirer of the Russian stars Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov, who each famously defected and made new careers in America. Other Dances, a pas de deux created in 1976 for a New York Public Library for the Performing Arts benefit, was specifically crafted to display their legendary technique and artistry.

Robbins chose four mazurkas and one waltz by Chopin, the composer whose piano music had inspired him for Dances at a Gathering. Although Chopin did not invent the mazurka, a stylized Polish dance in triple meter, his compositions brought them to the public attention and raised them to a new level of sophistication. Other Dances, through its simplicity and virtuosity, pays homage to both Chopin’s Romanticism and the fluidity of classical ballet technique.

Full of heartfelt emotion, this simple yet stirring pas de deux leaves audiences in silent awe.

Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain premiered in 2005 at NYCB’s annual New Combinations Evening, which honors the anniversary of George Balanchine’s birth with world premiere ballets. A ballet in two parts, the first section is set to Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, and features three couples. For the second section, only one couple returns, and performs a haunting pas de deux set to Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel. Originally performed by Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto, this was the last ballet Wheeldon created for Soto, before Soto retired from dancing in June of 2005.

The apex of Balanchine’s collaborations with Igor Stravinsky, Agon is an intense masterpiece and signature NYCB work, ever contemporary in its athletic competitiveness.

The Agon pieces were all modeled after examples in a French dance manual of the mid-17^th Century. Agon ("The Contest") is not a mythical subject piece to complete a trilogy with Apollo and Orpheus. In fact, it has no musical or choreographic subject beyond the new interpretation of the venerable dances that are its pretext. It was even conceived without provision for scenery and was independent, at least in Stravinsky’s mind, of décor, period, and style.