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While Balanchine always admired fleetness of foot, and aggressive phrasing, the newer New York City Ballet look marries a hypercaffeinated attack with an unapologetic, sinewy athleticism, as if we're being shown the advanced, post-doctoral colloquium of the New York City Ballet workout. At least, that's how it looked Tuesday night. The program began with a revival of Christopher Wheeldon's redundantly named Carousel (A Dance) from Richard Rodger's 2002 centennial year. Redundancy might be the theme of this Carousel, as Wheeldon devotes tremendous amounts of time and real-estate to demonstrating that a carousel does, in fact, move in a big circle. As part of Martins' eternal youth movement, Kathryn Morgan, a young company apprentice, danced the lead with Seth Orza. Looking very much an adolescent verging on her first romantic experience (usually an experience easier for a dancer of such years to live than communicate), Morgan flitted about and amongst Wheeldon's ensemble of fair-goers seeming both eager for experience and sweetly modest in Holly Hynes canary yellow dress (back in 2002 having more than one Girl in the Yellow Dress at Lincoln Center seemed almost sacrilegious, but that's another story). Orza exuded strength and charm as Morgan's love interest, and the two made a surprisingly convincing romantic pair, at least until the meat of their romantic duet to "If I Loved You," (was there ever a better melody for love?). More than a few tentative moments suggested that Orza was a recent replacement. As talented and charming as Morgan may be, she doesn't seem to have the fearlessness of the role's originator, Alexandra Ansanelli, who would famously hurl herself into one wild, off-balance pirouette after another, challenging her partner (Damian Woetzal or Benjamin Millepied) to rescue her before she became a smear on the stage. Most of those turns seemed missing with Morgan and Orza, or so toned-down as to be unrecognizable. As for the rest of the ballet, the corp looked game but ragged, and Maurice Kaplow and City Ballet's orchestra rendered Rodger's heavenly melodies so well that once again I recalled Balanchine's admonishment to close one's eyes and enjoy the music.

The head-banging began in earnest with an excerpt from one of the hits of last spring's Diamond Project, Jorma Elo's frenetic Slice to Sharp. As this was mostly the ballet's finale, I found myself with little time to wonder how Elo managed to cram so many steps into the interstices of the delightfully played Vivaldi. Or why, for that matter. Instead I admired the dancers' verve, especially the panache with which the tiny Joaquin de Luz flipped the very healthy and not-at-all insubstantial Sofiane Sylve over his shoulder (and yet he has trouble partnering the pixieish Megan Fairchild, but that's another story). As opening-night galas such as this are also an opportunity to welcome back, at least in one's own mind, dancers favorite and otherwise, I was also reminded that any day you can see Wendy Whelan danceany can't be entirely bad.

With my skull still ringing, figuratively, from the Elo, the curtain rose on the rare treat of the evening: the return to the stage, however fleeting, of the incomparable Janie Taylor, dancing in the "Purple" section of Peter Martins' 1987 Ecstatic Orange. I hadn't seen Taylor perform since July of last year, and, due to illness and injury, her performances over the past few years have been interrupted by depressingly long absences. A rare spirit onstage, Taylor once looked to be City Ballet's next great ballerina, and for awhile she seemed to have become Peter Martins' muse, before her recent lacunae. It's hard to describe Taylor's persona without writing of qualities that seem absurdly contradictory in black-and-white: phenomenal power (when healthy) tempered by an almost-consumptive frailty (she would be a Giselle for the ages); ferocious passion tightly chained by an equally ferocious reserve. Pale-skinned to the point of transparency, with glorious cascades of blonde hair and exotic cheekbones, Taylor could be simultaneously the girl next door and a creature both supernatural and feral. I can't think of any other dancer who could inform unforgettable performances of both Dewdrop and the doomed heroine of La Valse with an almost palpable contempt for the safe and mundane, and an overarching hunger for the transcendent, pushing the envelope as the path to salvation. Balanchine would have loved her.

Set to a measured, rhythmic score by Michael Torke, "Purple" seemed quite the jeweled miniature after the bombast of Slice to Sharp, or that of Friandises, to follow, and harkens back to the introspective quirkiness of Martins' first work, Calcium Light Night. Both in purple unitards, Taylor and Sebastien Marcovici (himself often out with injuries) enact a series of poses in which she strikingly curls up against him, resting against, say, his back or thigh, while her long and tapering feet brace against the stage with their pointes. While "Purple" is no less a veneration of the woman than most Balanchine works, here the man is more an ambulatory prop than cavalier, and she less a goddess than a hyper cool, yet sultry, diva. "Purple" became an angular, occasionally opaque re-coming-out party for her, who best acknowledged her public by giving a classically Taylor, inward-directed performance.

Taylor's return was indeed a sight for sore eyes, made all the more poignant by the bombast which bracketed "Purple," which was followed by the finale of Martins' Friandises, which, along with Slice... was a popular hit earlier this year. Again, Tiler Peck spun like a top, Daniel Ulbricht beat up on the puny force of gravity, and the large ensemble demonstrated any number of high-octane maneuvers to the frenzied climaxes of Christopher Rouse's overheating score. In Friandises, Martins coheres his dancers' great energies into a tightly focused, relentless machine for multiplying and applying force, rather like a bludgeon or dentist's drill.

I shall doubtless have many occasions this year to wax lyrical about the great and eternally underrated Kyra Nichols, who will retire next spring after thirty-three years with New York City Ballet, so I'll keep it short and sweet here. Nichols is the last true link to the era of Balanchine, and to watch her embody music, and become the living instrument of Balanchine's choreographic arguments is to catch a glimpse, however removed, of genius. Nichols has had a long and splendid career, and that, now, any corps girl might dance rings around her, technically, is irrelevant. In her musicality, phrasing, and unadorned purity of style, Nichols is nonpareil. Here, Nichols appeared with her longtime partner Philip Neal in the well-tempered opening and wild-and-crazy finale of Balanchine's Walpurgisnacht Ballet, where the girls all let down their hair and fly about the stage with sweetly chaste abandon. With her sublimely direct phrasing and playful musicality, Nichols was, as always, a tonic for the eyes and mind. I couldn't help noticing that at the ballet's near-ultimate moments, where she's leading a line of corps girls in a simple relevé-retiré combination, Nichols sometimes seemed a beat ahead of everyone else. Was she overcooking the rubato, or listening to a different, long-departed drummer?

Next came the only new work on the program, or, at least, new to City Ballet, with the New York premiere of Alexei Ratmansky's Middle Duet, danced by Maria Kowroski and Albert Evans. Although Middle Duet dates from 1998, I found myself thinking it could have in fact been made for Kowroski, so perfectly does it showcase her wicked, split-second comedic timing, a quality too-often overshadowed by her infamous flexibility and the long, tapered curves of her line. The lights rose on Kowroski in a simple dress by Holly Hynes, with her back to the audience as she faced her upstage partner, Albert Evans. As the orchestra played the thumping and oddly tango-like rhythms of excerpts from Yuri Khanon's "Middle Symphony," Kowroski put her long legs through evolutions resembling a fractured and accelerated version of the kind of facing-the-barre pointework you might see in a mid-level pointe class, except that Evans is Korowski's barre, bracing her torso and providing the strong center to which Kowroski's compass-like legs return again and again, and Kowroski strays far from the forthright and upright. A typical phrase might find her doing piqué retirés on alternating feet, then a biiiig echappé to seconde, on pointe, dipping into a deep, deep plié where suddenly her torso extends the downward thrust by going limp, until Evans hauls her back upright.

Throughout Middle Duet, Ratmansky plays with such transitions between a ballet dancer's familiar tightly held verticality and the release of that control, building on the catchy starts and stops of Khanon's tangoish rhythms, as well as tango dancers' proclivities for unexpected shifts of power and control amongst each pair. Kowroski devoured her part like it was a box of bon-bons created just for her, and, while Middle Duet wasn't made for her, it's hard for me to imagine a dancer better suited to the role than Kowroski, who sometimes unstrung and restrung her sinews with flash-bulb quickness, or elsewhere modulated those transitions with fine delineations. Middle Duet ends, a bit predictably, with both dancers limp and sprawled onstage. It's a lightweight piece, but, as with "Purple," seemed a happy island of calm among the gala's relentlessly roiled seas.

The short opening section of New York Export: Opus Jazz was a perfunctory nod to the existence of Jerome Robbins, before the evening ended with yet another bang, as Ashley Bouder and Damian Woetzel attacked the pas de deux from Stars and Stripes, then the company delivered the finale. Bouder danced with an almost-frightening command, tossing off the role's technical challenges with ease, all the while beaming at the audience (and Woetzel) as if she were having the greatest time in the world. There's a hard edge to Bouder's attack which can obscure her underrated musicality, but it was great fun seeing her showing off by holding a few poses on pointe for just a bit extra in the sturm and drang of the coda. And if there was ever a role that could tolerate some brass (not to mention piss and vinegar), it's Liberty Belle. Woetzel played off Bouder's bravura with his own familiar brilliance and showmanship.

While it's possible to spend much time and energy attempting to discern great meaning in the tea leaves of a gala program such as this, the greatest message is the simplest one: City Ballet's back, will be back until February, and that's more than enough.