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Four years since I last saw NYCB and good to see them looking on much crisper form than a few years ago. Of course the style is more interesting below the waist but despite a few stiff torsos in Serenade, the precision and ensemble of the company was strong.

Serenade emerged in excellent shape - the opening image of the ghostly women posed the blue background was like the shock of an iced bath (New York was pretty sticky and humid), very refreshing. Darci Kistler and Cahrles Askegaard led, supported by Ashley Bouder and Sara Means with Stephen Hanna supported: all knew exactly what they were about.

I've always considered this an essentially Russian work - the classical references (Bayadere, Swan Lake)are clear to see, though I had missed before the traces of Russian folk dancing when a circle of the women click their feet are clear - but what really struck me this time was how well the Balanchine of 1934 divides the stage - the floor formations of circles, moving lines - in very much the style of the musicals of the day, think all those Busby Berkeley chorus lines.

Abstract Serenade may be but this staging had its own sense of drama, particularly in a ghoulish last movement. This was very much hommage at the grave of Giselle with palapable emotion and story telling between the leads, marred only by the knocked knees of the boys supporting the woman held aloft in the final exit.

Bugaku was something else. The empty stage and miaouwings of the music of Mayuzumi propmpted some sniggering at the start - but this was a very charged performance led by a steely, long limbed Maria Kowroski and a very virile Albert Evans. Their nuptial night pas de deux had a real erotic frisson, the impossible lifts and balances Balancine wrote here makes his dancers look like copulating locusts.

A poor realisation of Karainska's flower costumes for the women, far less subtle certainly the one exhibited at the V&A exhibition in 1981.

Not a work to see often but far more convincing than in the Royal Ballet's rather embarassed attempt in 1988.

I am too un-British to enjoy the poster bright Union Jack; Balanchine's peculiar 1976 bicentennial celebration. A very peculiar programme note "in the tepid euphoria of quasi-official celebration, dimmed by an exhausted peace and clownish public scandal, it has been deemed fitting to recall roots... the sacerdotal function of professional soldiering canonized by Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins..."
 

At an hour it's a good 30 mins too long. It opens with massed marching of Scottish tartans. This choreography would win no prizes for highland dancing, but as a Broadway show it's a riot, performed with tremendous energy, vim and brio.

I always think that Damian Woetzel looks as though he has a bad smell under his nose, but here he showed tremendous disdain leading the Dress MacLeods, dancing Benjamin Millepied's Lennoxes off the stage.

Philip Neal led the Menzies, high stepping with energy and precision. Wendy Whelan led the jazzy, Leggy MacDonalds of Sleat.

This Scottish scene, though far too long, does climax in a defile of all 72 dancers, particularly striking as one colour of tartan changes to the next like a peeling rainbow as the front row turns upstage.

The costermonger duet was well milked by Nilas Martins and Kyra Nichols - but this is pure corn, the sort of funny duet done far more funnily by practically any other choreographer. The cutsey appearance of two children in the donkey cart at the end upstaged their illustrious luminaries.

And then a spinning, high kicking, Balanchine with his hair down (though which one ...?) massed finale of sailors and wrens. Woetzel turning like a top (though with a problem in the exit at the end of his solo) and an excellent Teresa Reichlen leading the wrens.

A far more satisfying programme in the theatre than the programming suggested - and thanks for posters for the O'Neals info. We brunched under the watchful gaze of Lynn Seymour and Monica Mason.