NEW YORK -- Watching "Brandenburg," Jerome Robbins' last ballet, is both a sweet and sad experience. Robbins seems to have poured a career's worth of choreographic and musical concerns and signature moves into the work, which was performed by the New York City Ballet recently at the New York State Theater. All those elements blend in a smooth-flowing plotless piece that is good-looking, playful and tender.
The imprint of Robbins' long years choreographing and directing Broadway musicals is on the second of the ballet's two central pas de deux. A man and a woman dance together but seldom touch, the space between their bodies alive with unarticulated emotions that are a good deal plainer and less metaphorically expressed than they might be through the more formal manners of purer classical ballet.The patterns in "Brandenburg" are quietly masterly, as are the ways Robbins mixes small and large ensembles and moves his dancers on and off stage. Best of all, the choreographer's signature small-movement jokes, so mirthless-looking in retrospect, appear delicately playful and utterly at home here. Unabrupt, they fit seamlessly into the flow of the dance and are filled with genuine humor and a new-seeming warmth.
The dancers responded in kind in a first-rate performance that suggested but did not overstress all Robbins' small inventions. New in the first pas de deux, Sebastien Marcovici seemed to be pushing himself very hard, and his partnering of Wendy Whelan, in particular, looked strained.
James Fayette and Maria Kowroski, new in the second pas de deux, turned that dance into an exercise in airy, delicately precise dancing that worked in its own right but lacked the profound sadness and drama embedded in the original interpretations by Lourdes Lopez and Nikolaj Hubbe.
Riolama Lorenzo and Stuart Capps were an interesting match in the first of two subsidiary pas de deux, Capps adding a zesty complementary edge to Lorenzo's innately glowing warmth. Rachel Rutherford's lightness and speed gave her the look of a cheerfully errant butterfly in the second duet, grounded charmingly by her partner, Jared Angle. The lead cast was completed by Deanna McBrearty, Carrie Lee Riggins, Benjamin Millepied and Christopher Wheeldon.
Robbins' "Afternoon of a Faun," set to the Debussy score, is capable of a surprising variety of subtle interpretations. Jock Soto and Darci Kistler stressed the youthful glossiness of the two dancers who meet and part in a ballet studio.
Soto brought an unusual sexual intensity to his part, making the duet more a boy-meets-girl story than a dance about the narcissism of youth and, in particular, young ballet dancers. But Kistler's frequent manipulation of her lustrous mane made this a trio for a boy, a girl and her hair.
Robbins' "Antique Epigraphs," a gently stylized dance for eight women dressed in soft-colored long Greek tunics, combines perfectly with its Debussy score to suggest a community of women that is of the distant past yet afloat in time and space, intent on mysterious private rituals.