Since City Ballet went to its current system of having a few set programs repeated a few times each season, they've seen fit to dub each program with a generic, vaguely descriptive title. So, Sunday afternoon was the season's second presentation of "Dance for Joy." I feel somewhat unclean for finding fault with this title; I mean, who wouldn't be in favor of Joy? And, for that matter, Dance? And yet, as a title it promises too much, and says too little. Is it too cynical of me to imagine it was chosen as marketing code-speak for "This Program Has No Downers?" Probably. But given the overheated prose of City Ballet's new monochromatic website, it's probably giving the company's copywriters credit for too much subtlety. And there aren't enough exclamation points!

That's not to say that joy, and dance, weren't present at this matinee, but not, perhaps, in the implied quantities. There's joy aplenty in Brandenburg,, Jerome Robbins' final ballet, or at least a clever facsimile thereof. I must confess I've never warmed to Brandenburg. Whenever I see it lurch towards its bouncy, repetitive finale, I always imagine Robbins in the studio, realizing that his creative well has finally run dry: all that ensemble hippity hoppity stuff, and all that shuffling about backwards with one's behind sticking out, like butt-bumpercars. Not a felicitous image. But of ersatz joy, there's plenty from moment the curtain rises, where Robbins is mining his once-reliable vein of dancers-as-perky-adolescents. Although Holly Hynes' costumes, and Robbins' courtly movement vocabulary, suggest Bach's Baroque era, these boys and girls aren't much removed from earlier, more famous generations of Robbins' kiddies, except that this bunch is considerably less interesting. During the relentlessly cheery opening sections of Brandenburg, I always wonder if Robbins really thought of dancers as charming children; in no other work of his are the puppeteer's strings so sadly evident. Not even a sparkling performance by Ashley Bouder and Gonzalo Garcia, leading the opening section, to the complete "Brandenburg Concerto No. 3," could rescue this piece. Nor could Maria Kowroski and Philip Neal in the vaster-than-empires-and-more-slow pas de deux to the andante from the Concerto No. 1.

By now, Christopher Wheeldon's penchant for overstating the obvious, as he does with great enthusiasm from the very title of Carousel (A Dance), is a very dead horse, yet I must beat on it still. Was he bracing his audience for the disappointing absence John Raitt? Here, Wheeldon's ensemble work is depressingly thin -- he overdoes the motif of having his ensemble spin about in a big circle (maybe like, I dunno, a carousel?) and other spinning motifs. And lots of waltzing. I'd always found the duets Wheeldon made for the protagonists to be conventional and melodramatic, if not saccharine and shallow. But what did it matteR? They could be playing tiddlywinks to the romantic hymn of "If I Loved You," and it would still be heartbreaking. My main memory of earlier casts are of Alexandra Ansanelli throwing herself into death-defying off-balance triple and quadruple pirouettes, challenging Benjamin Millepied to catch her before she became a stain on the stage. It was exciting, but more for Ansanelli's wall-of-death bravery than Wheeldon's choreography, which seemed stunningly derivative of a dozen or so swoopy love duets you all could name as easily as I.

Given all this disappointment, I wasn't expecting much from this performance of Carousel,especially with Tiler Peck as the heroine in her very yellow dress. One of Martins' young technical wunderkinds, Peck had shown herself to have a phenomenal gift for turning (triples, quads, quintuples? No problem!), and for a bright, beaming smile which seems completely inextinguishable, no matter how you might wish it were otherwise. Stylistically, she seemed a one-trick pony. I suppose the hard-core NYC balletomanes who seem to know every dancer from their first steps at the School of American Ballet will enjoy this opportunity to look down their noses at me, but I was completely floored by how good Peck proved to be, and how badly I'd underestimated her. Not only did she refrain from incessant beaming, she presented each each phase of her character's growing attraction to Damian Woeztel's raffish, bandana'd roustabout with such understated, refined clarity that I began to reconsider my opinion of Carousel. I certainly had never before seen just how carefully Wheeldon portrayed the girl's emotional growth in her duets with Woetzel, or, rather, I had, but the result seemed rather perfunctory and by-the-numbers ("boy meets girl..."), until Peck's subtle performance. Subtle? Tiler Peck? Well, yes. From the delicacy in her arms to the perfect timing with which she went limp in Woetzel's arms, almost a quote from Serenade,except he doesn't lower her to the floor, her performance was a marvel of carefully gauged and delicately applied effects. Woetzel danced with the flamboyance and throwaway brilliance that have marked his decades at City Ballet. It was a treat to see again his tremendous stage-savviness, charm and charisma, as much as his still formidable technique. It's depressing to think that after this spring, he'll be gone.

It's also depressing to think that after February 10th, Nikolaj Hübbe will be gone, too. Despite Balanchine's well-documented lack of interest in male dancders, New York City Ballet has always had at least one or two men who could be counted among the best in the world. D'Amboise (I know, he didn't have the greatest technique), Villella, Martins, Anderson, Woetzel, Boal, Hübbe. I look at the current crop of young male principals and soloists, and worry for the future. There are some really fine men, some jesters, some puzzlements, but no budding Villella. (Ironically, Ashley Bouder's the closest thing to Villella City Ballet's had in ages.) All this is a lengthy introduction to Hübbe's appearance with Yvonne Borree in Peter Martins' Zakouski. Zakouski are snacks of some kind or other, and this little pas de deux indeed reminded me of a snack, but more along the lines of Cheese Doodles than caviar and blini. Zakouski's set to tidbits of Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, as played quite ably by Arturo Delmoni on violin, and Richard Moredock on piano. In boots and a bright, baggy peasant blouse, Hübbe kicked, turned and strutted through vaguely gypsyish solos and duets with the wan Borree, echoes and refractions of things you've seen before in Dances at a Gathering, or Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet. As this is a Peter Martins ballet, the steps are tricky and intricate and brutally difficult beneath the dance's happy-go-lucky veneer. But also, as this is a Peter Martins ballet, its charm is either invisible, or so overdone as to have been applied with a trowel. It takes Hübbe, with his painfully handsome face and emphatic blond mane, his godlike physique and unquenchable ebullience to bring Martins' conceits to life. He's out there, hopping and smacking his heels together like it's the most fabulous thing in the world, and, for a few moments, it is.

The last time Nancy McDill, one of City Ballet's long-time pianists, played a role onstage in addition to her instrument was as a dowdy rehearsal pianist in Christopher Wheeldon's sweet and long-departed Variations Serieuses. Sporting, I think, a shapeless poncho, Channel Thirteen bag and huge glasses, she looked every inch a cantankerous Upper-West-Side cat lady. As the pianist in Jerome Robbins' The Concert, she couldn't be more the opposite. I've always seen this role played by men in elegant cutaway tuxes, and here was McDill, glamorous and sophisticated and red-headed in a black silk-and-velvet gown, striding in a grand diagonal across the stage as the orchestra pumped away at Chopin's Military Polonaise. She handled her bits of stage business with perfect timing, transfixing with an icy glare the audience, which had the temerity to applaud too soon, and fussing at her keyboard with a handkerchief, raising a cloud of dust with perfect aplomb.

The Concert is Robbins bitterly funny look at the fantasies that run through the minds of "ordinary" people at a concert -- in this case, a Chopin piano recital. Robbins deftly sketches their characters, most prominently a slightly ditzy, dewey-eyed bombshell (Maria Kowroski), a cigar-chomping, henpecked husband who lusts after her (Adam Hendrickson), and the be-pearled snooty wife who does the pecking (Gwyneth Muller). Although Kowroski can be uneven in dramatic roles, she's a tremendous comedienne, and handles her role's pratfalls with a happy goofiness, and rock-solid timing. In the section where she's finally chosen the hat of her dreams, only to see another woman trot past her with the exact same model (a ridiculous blue-cotton-candy puffball), her transformation from elation to dejection, her eyes plummeting, her torso crumpling as she hobbles into the wings, is a pure delight. (Kowroski's really to die for in The Concert and Western Symphony, both roles originated by the priceless Tanaquil LeClercq. I urge whatever London readers I might have not to miss her in these ballets when City Ballet's visiting in March.) The "Mistake Waltz" was as hilarious as ever, and Hendrickson's Walter-Mitty fantasies, and Muller's iciness were perfectly drawn, and winning. It was saddening to contrast the Brandenburg's preciosity with the throwaway genius of The Concert. But at least City Ballet's programmers save the best for last, and unrelenting joy would probably have been more than I could've taken.

Borree, Bouder, Hendrickson, Hübbe, Kowroski, Muller, Neal, Peck, Woetzel

Whatever the situation may or may not be with the layout of NYCB's new website, your reviews on Ballet.co.uk are ALWAYS reasons to 'Dance for Joy'.

I saw the above programme as well, and just wanted to concur how sad it will be to lose both Woetzel and Hubbe from the male number of this company. Both were on form that afternoon. What grand service they have done. Both were rife with easy virtue, and Hubbe was magnificently dramatic, toying both with Martins' choreography and the audience in terms of muscial dynamic. Hubbe insisted that we watch and then rapidly turned out (or occasionally sideways) and beamed that magnificent wide smile as if to say: 'See, told you I wouldn't disappoint'. Let there be no certain question: He didn't. Bouree simply faded into the depth of the blue in the background: Hubbe was as regal in his bearing as the purple of his tights. Denmark has much to look forward to in the next chapter. There will be new lights amongst that dark, I'm certain.

Cheers, Bruce