Jerome Robbins' The Goldberg Variations is one of those ballets for which you should pack a lunch. Set to Bach's familiar keyboard suite, Goldberg clocks in at an hour and nineteen minutes. One of Robbins' ideas is to contrast eighteenth-century courtly deportment with more-modern styles, as the ensemble starts the ballet in practice clothes, but, like a slow-motion reverse strip-tease, add elements -- shirts, knee-britches, jackets -- until, at the end, they're all dressed as in Bach's time. A span of centuries, and sometimes one feels every minute of them. This wasn't the case Saturday night, as I sat engrossed by a lively and sharply focussed reading by every dancer, including many who were making debuts.

As I listened to the progressions of sarabandes, gigues and other archaic forms grandly played by Cameron Grant, I thought back to Robbins' The Concert, which depicts the comic daydreams of an audience at a Chopin recital. Was Robbins showing us, in Goldberg, a similar glimpse into his dreams? Certainly Robbins' Goldberg is a well-tempered and orderly place, where the playful dances of the first half give way to the grandeur of the second. While Balanchine might've dived more deeply into Bach's inner structure (as in Concerto Barocco), Robbins, while still quite formal, reacts more personally. However Robbins deploys them, his dancers are recognizably people, with hints of character and situation Balanchine would probably consider needless ornamentation. Robbins was never about "just do the steps." Goldberg's length gives Robbins ample time to show a facets of the human experience, as dancers combine and recombine in duos, trios and ensembles.

Goldberg's first part is filled with buoyant and frolicking youths in familiar Robbins' dancing-adolescent land. Abi Stafford made a rather bland debut here. The quartet of Tyler Angle, Stephen Hanna, Adam Hendrickson and Andrew Veyette bounded with youthful camaraderie and athleticism, and Megan Fairchild was also endearing without being quite cloying. With a rather formal changing-of-the-guard introduction to Part 2, Robbins sends the kiddies packing, and brings in the heavy artillery, in a procession of three leading couples, here in the persons of Rachel Rutherford and Jared Angle, Maria Kowroski and Philip Neal, and Wendy Whelan and Benjamin Millepied. Although this was the first performance of Goldberg in several years, and many of these dancers were making debuts, the performances overall were clean and polished, if not quite as revelatory as past years' more seasoned casts. Rutherford and Angle were particularly intriguing in their duet, in which she'd repeatedly bend over double on pointe, hanging limply as Angle slowly righted her and placed her in more-upright postures. There's really nothing in the Bach to suggest this Rutherford's oddly passive odalisque, indeed, it playfully goes against Goldberg's measured and forthright grain, Robbins being yet again the contrarian. Angle guided Rutherford with ease through these contortions, and in a rare show of virtuosity, blazed around the stage with some beautifully clean and plummily ample sautes de basques.

The leggy Kowroski and Neal looked marvelous together, in a duet making the most of her extra-long extensions and flexibility. They were so well-matched aesthetically that I marveled that we hadn't seen this pairing more often. I'd spent years watching Kowroski and bemoaning that in "serious" roles her somewhat affectless face detracts from her luxuriant extremities, but this night I played the mental game of looking at Kowroski the way I'd watched City Ballet dancers back in the great days of the Seventies. When enticing some diehard ABT fans into City Ballet's foreign world, I'd always admonish them, in regarding City Ballet dancers for the first time, "Don't look at their faces. Look at their feet." (Under Balanchine, it was usually the feet of City Ballet's women that did the talking.) Watching Kowroski with these eyes gave me an entirely new appreciation of the richness and subtlety of her phrasing. I've seen few dancers sculpt the air so grandly, and with such gorgeously arched instruments.

I've always warmed to Neal's dancing, as he's often been a bit of an odd-man-out at City Ballet. Peter Martins is intrigued by compact and powerfully athletic men, yet Neal's all about elegance of line, making perfect use of his long, well-propotioned legs and feet. I also found much to admire in his somewhat unreliable technique, or rather how he worked his way through rough spots. In watching his pirouettes of years past you never knew if he'd be spinning like a top or a dreidel, and there'd be days his double tours were on vacation, or strike. Neal would make his face a mask and bravely soldier through such dismal outings. I admired his pluck, or perhaps it was just oddly encouraging to know that a seasoned pro could fall out of pirouette just as well as I could (although falling out of a much better one). Then there would be days when his technique did indeed clock in, and his double tours and pirouettes would be impeccable. At such times Neal's face would brighten up with a brilliantly genuine smile, as if he was a gambler throwing nothing but sevens and elevens. And that's how he danced in Goldberg, with an artless joy at his strength and technique, as if nobody in the theater could be happier than himself. He danced the odd "Petroushka" solo with grace, clarity and eloquence; it's one of the finest things I've seen from him in years. I wondered what in the Bach inspired Robbins to quote one of his own great dancing roles (he was the last person to be taught Petrouchka by Fokine). I came up with nothing, but I admired both the fecundity of Robbins' imagination, and his adroitness at marrying such disparate aesthetics. Also in debuts, Whelan and Millepied were quite grand in their adagio if perhaps a bit in need of seasoning. With his clean, unaffected style and thick, dark hair, Millepied brought to mind the quiet perfection of Helgi Tomasson, his part's originator.

I've left the best for last, as the Kaitlyn Gilliland debuted with Jason Fowler in dancing the Theme with which Robbins opens and closes the ballet. Tall and elongated, the striking Gilliland paced through the Theme's calm measures with an equally pure and graceful (and tall) Jason Fowler. While all the other dancers started the ballet in basic leotards and tights, and finished in Joe Eula's elegant eighteenth-century garb, the Theme dancers start out that way, but finish in practice clothes. As a conceit it's pure Robbins: perhaps too clever, perhaps too trite, ambiguous in meaning yet strikingly evocative. In any event, it's not inappropriate to end this pilgrimage of a ballet by bringing it full circle, although I was just as glad that the second coming of the Theme didn't presage an instant repeat of the ballet. One sentimental journey through the centuries per day is plenty for me.

It was strange but true that Ashley Bouder would be making her debut in that Balanchine roller coaster, Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, along with the debuting Gonzalo Garcia. I'm pretty sure these were just their debuts with City Ballet, as Tschai Pas is a perennial favorite for gigs throughout the country. Regardless, it was the treat I'd anticipated, at least from La Bouder. I could catalog the many ways she shone, but much of it you've read from me before. She's made a particular specialty of what I can only call the double-double pique pirouette which Balanchine likes to give his bravura women, in which she steps into a double pique turn on her forward foot, immediately followed by a double pique pirouette on her back foot. It's a dizzyingly quick, blink-and-you'll-miss it moment, except if you blink at Bouder, you'll most likely miss triples.

She was at her most blazingly self-confident, happily smirking at the audience at each tour de force, as if to say "Did you see that? Pretty good, right? Wait'll you see what's next." Among the bravura leaps and turns and rock-solid pointework of her solo (she can pop into an echappé on pointe and pose, it seems, forever), she gave a eye-popping reminder of her extraordinary rubato. There's a point in her solo when she is in a releve on pointe with her working leg swung up to second for an instant. Rather than simply snap her working foot back down to join the other in a tight fifth in releve (if only for an instant), she held her leg out at her side, and then leisurely lowered it while gazing at her foot's progress towards its mate. It was as if she were admiring her own ability to stop time for a moment of reflection in the midst of this rapid-fire allegro, and also making sure we noticed it too. It was pure bravura, and pure attitude.

Attitude was also in abundance from Garcia, but entirely of the wrong sort. His nonchalant partnering of Bouder led to a couple of near-disasters. Once when she threw herself into an unsupported pirouette and his hands didn't make it to her waist until after she'd teetered away from the vertical. I probably shocked my neighbors with an involuntary gasp. At the end of the coda, the timing and spacing of those two "surprise" fish-dive leaps looked ever-so-slightly off, as at the first Bouder looked to be stretching out her steps to reach Garcia. In the second she simply hurled herself, full-bore, at him, giving him the choice of catching her or dying. He caught her. It's not just that the pair looked underrehearsed, but that Garcia seemed a disinterested party in the adagio, and Bouder looked to be working as hard to engage his attention as the audience's. In his solos, Garcia was aggressively underachieving. Although he still has the nicely rounded jumps and soft landings I remember from his guest stint here four years ago, he's become unforgivably sloppy. A principal dancer of the New York City Ballet does not fall out of pirouettes when he's front-and-center in a piece like Tschai Pas. Even the principals whom I think Martins promoted prematurely can manage turn a la seconde with their leg held at a level ninety degrees, yet this was beyond the droopy-legged Garcia. Hell, forget principals. City Ballet has plenty of men at the soloist and corps levels who could do better, not to mention the senior classes at SAB.

It's not just that Garcia's technique is uneven, it's that he seems not to care. In the first Tarantella he danced with Bouder, he sauntered casually from trick to trick, as if he were a laid-back Neopolitan by way of North Beach. Not to harsh his mellow, but I can't believe he danced so half-assedly in San Francisco. This is the man to whom Helgi Tomasson, the purest and most scrupulously honest dancer I've ever seen, chose to teach his beautiful solo from Balanchine's Le Baiser de la Fee? Whether it's his heart or his technique Garcia left in San Francisco, he needs to retrieve at least the latter post haste. If he truly cares so little about dancing for City Ballet and its paying audience, he should at least fake it better while he's collecting a salary.

The program closed with a perennial favorite of mine, Balanchine's Western Symphony. Perhaps, perhaps, it shouldn't be numbered among Balanchine's greatest works (he had so many!), but in how it accomodates Balanchine's grand conceit, of making an old-style Imperial Ballet divertissement in the trappings of America's Wild West, Western's a work of genius, or, rather collaboration of geniuses. Hershey Kay's brilliant orchestration of familiar cowboy tunes into a grand symphony gives it its contagiously danceable musical underpinnings.

And Karinska! Her costumes for the men, with their black satin pants and cowboy shirts (with brightly colored pockets), bandanas and Stetsons, are marvelous, but her dance-hall girl costumes are pure genius, magically both brazen and refined. Their brightly colored corsets, stockings, open-fingered opera gloves and chic/silly headpieces are near-perfect, but her living, breathing tutus were works of art. Exquisitely layered and cut on the bias so they rode up high on the girls' hips while drooping lower in front and behind, her skirts were shaped in back to delicately suggest that the girls are wearing bustles. I use the past tense because, after a few too many onstage mishaps with decaying, decades-old costumes, City Ballet remade them three years ago. While most of the costumes were recreated with close fidelity to the originals, somehow the tutus were cut in simple circles. Gone were the french-cut hips and invisible bustles. Instead there's too much fabric at the girls' hips. The tutus twist and turn with more abandon now, and the girls have taken to jauntily bunching their skirts up at their hips more often and emphatically than before, which unfortunately skews Western's tightrope balance between high and low art, although I can almost forgive these liberties for the glimpses they give of brightly colored bows on the girls' panties, a detail I don't remember from the previous costumes (and how could I forget?). I've resigned myself to the remade costumes, although when the curtain first rose on them a few years ago I felt like I'd lost an old friend.

The key to Western is Balanchine's adroit mixture of classical technique and forms with Western themes, or at least how those themes played out in his imagination, famously influenced by the mythos of the West (he was seldom seen without his western-style, string tie) and American popular culture. (His favorite TV show was said to be "Wonder Woman" with Lynda Carter.) While there are many tongue-in-cheek moments in Western, Balanchine, in the 1950s, was following a time-honored formula of incorporating "native" dances into classical ballet, as Bournonville did with tarantellas, or Petipa with mazurkas and polonaises (leading Karsavina's father to bemoan their barbaric spread which wiped out his beloved minuets and quadrilles). Balanchine's greatest difference from his predecessors, aside from the native veins he mined, was that he created, not a story ballet, but a suite very much along the lines of his Symphony in C. As originally performed, Western even echoed the Bizet's movements, tempo for tempo, although Western's brutaly hard allegro third movement, in which Robert Barnett originally chased and roped a team of dance-hall fillies led by the young and appropriately named Allegra Kent, was soon dropped, as it was believed to be less interesting than the rest, choreographically and musically.

As the two ballerinas who'd previously led Western's first movement, Jennies Ringer and Somogyi, are absent due to maternal duties, Abi Stafford debuted in this lively curtain raiser, joined by Nilas Martins, returning to City Ballet's stage after a long absence, and looking fit and relaxed, like he'd just moseyed in off the 4:20 from Tombstone. While Stafford was strong and game, she was also sadly colorless and metronomic. Although she's made great strides in recent years, culminating in her deserved promotion to principal, here she was a throwback to the Abi of old, using her sure technique as a shield rather than a bridge to the audience. As this part calls for blowing kisses to the audience while hopping on pointe, stealing he partner's stetson, and general good-humored sassiness, Stafford's debut fell particularly short of the mark. Back in the saddle again, Martins was a sure partner for Stafford, and danced with a Western flair, miming firing sixshooters, fanning the ground beneath Stafford's pointes with his hat to, presumably, keep the friction of her great speed from setting them on fire, and goofing around by pulling his Stetson down tightly over his head with both hands while jumping into a double tour and pretending, with great consternation, to fall out of his landing.

All unwitting, Stafford and Martins represented the Scylla and Charybdis upon which Western can founder. If played too straight, the ballet can look flat and lifeless (although I'd argue that if done straight the right way, with just a hint of tongue in cheek, a little restraint can work wonders), with too much clowning around and improvised business, it looks like a hokey collection of cowboy cliches, and the hee-haws obscure much of Balanchine's design and not-inconsiderable wit. At this point, so many jokes have worked their way into Western that it might be impossible to strip them out, but it would be worth trying, especially in the second movement.

There's a rare film, made in 1956, of City Ballet performing Western. I'm always struck at first by the tremendously rapid tempi set by Leon Barzin, much faster than today's, and by the unforced, almost deadpan straightness with which the dancers perform, letting the jokes speak for themselves. Sometimes the straightness is the joke, as in the second movement, where Nicholas Magallanes portrays a love-lorn cowpoke, visited by a mystery woman, with all the Romantic grace and yearning of Prince Siegfried. Melissa Hayden played the dance-hall Odette so straight you might wonder if Balanchine had clued her into the duet's humor, and with just enough edge in the comically inept moments to show that she did, in fact, know. While Albert Evans no longer wipes his nose as he saunters across the stage and contemplates the lonesome jimson weed, he still plays this character so broadly he's mugging for laughs even when standing still. In retrospect, Robert Tewsley's refined and elegant portrayal looks better and better. While the blonde, pretty Sterling Hyltin didn't join Evans in playing the role for laughs, she was so straight-laced and subdued that I began to wonder if anyone had told her she was supposed to be funny, especially when Evans man-handles her in an inverted parody of partnering 101. Though strong technically and with an appealing coltishness, Hyltin has seemed a bit lost since making principal last year, with her strong allegro looking a bit dull-edged. Speaking of Hayden, Hyltin, in her solo, did follow Hayden in embellishing a circle of single assemblé turns with an entrechat-six's worth of big clear beats. Perhaps this was hubris, as after finishing these beautifully, she fell out of her next pirouette. Once again I've had cause to miss Alexandra Ansanelli, whose beatific wackiness and daredevil bravery, launching herself from a frightening distance into Evans' arms, brought this tumbleweed sylph to life, from her sideways bourreeing entrance to her final goodbye kiss on Evans' cheek.

It was in the films' final movement that City Ballet's dancers of yesteryear cut loose, with the leads trading can-you-top-this? tricks in a sort of dance-hall Battle of the Sexes. Led by the always astonishing Tanaquil le Clercq and Jacques d'Amboise, there was bravura and gumption aplenty, and here today's cast gave away nothing to their predecessors in my memories. Strutting onstage, arm in arm, were all 5'10" of Teresa Reichlen, topped by Karinska's amazing curved and cantilevered hat, and Damian Woetzel, playing the dashing cowman to the hilt. Over the years, I've found that the more I anticipate each coming trick, the more I love this final section. Reichlen was a leggy dynamo of pride and bravura, from her hip-swaying tippy-toe kitten walk on pointe, to her stunningly hard hopping diagonal on pointe, swiveling seamlessly between developpes to the side and back into arabesque penchées. In what other ballet might you see a ballerina prepare for a string of fouetté turns by blowing her partner a kiss? Aside from his graying hair, Woetzel seems impervious to time, clowning about with a flair equal to d'Amboise's, and leaping with surpassing virtuosity. Woetzel countered Reichlen's tricks with fiery jeté coupés into big, hopping sautes de chat and Cechetti changements, pulling his feat up beneath him as if riding an invisible bronco. Later he brought down the house with some dizzyingly fast pirouette-double-tour combinations. In the bit where the ballerina swings her leg at her partner's head, Le Clercq was rather decorous towards d'Amboise, but I do admire how recently Maria Kowroski and now Reichlen deliver their kicks to Woetzel's face with such ferocity as to knock his block off if he fails to duck. Fortunately, Woetzel hasn't yet, and didn't on Saturday, ducking his head at the last minute and fixing a mocking glance at Reichlen, which only made her swing harder the next time.

Western's finale fills the stage with colorful throngs of sashaying girls and buck-and-winging cowboys, in one of Balanchine's greater applause machines, ending with the ranked company spinning through rapid-fire single pirouettes as the curtain drops. It was such an exhilarating finale that I bounded home on my own rush of adrenaline, and was all the way to 54th Street before I realized I had no clue at all why City Ballet decided to saddle (sorry!) this bill with the title "Spirit of Discovery." I also realized I didn't care, and my inner cowboy resolved never again to have my thoughts fenced in by such marketing-speak. As Jennifer Dunning said in her review of this same program in The New York Times, "whatever happened to Programs A, B and C?" Indeed. Somebody round up a posse.

Angle, Bouder, Evans, Fowler, Garcia, Gilliland, Hanna, Hendrickson, Hyltin, Kowroski, Martins, Millepied, Neal, Reichlen, Rutherford, Stafford, Veyette, Whelan, Woetzel