Winter Season

New York City Ballet’s four-week Winter Season offers 22 ballets that travel from the sublime to the austere to the frightening. Although the company’s most celebrated dancer, the luminous Wendy Whelan, just retired, most of the current principals are able to animate the neo-classical repertoire with sparkling technique and dramatic flair. Considering that NYCB crams more ballets into a home season than any other American company, that’s an accomplishment. There will be the usual bounty of ballets by Balanchine and Robbins plus a world premiere by resident choreographer Justin Peck.

City Ballet now has three home seasons a year at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, totaling 22 weeks annually, plus 5 weeks of Nutcracker.This is more than American Ballet Theatre’s home season, but ABT goes on tour more often. Let me remind you that New York is the only city where two world-class ballet companies co-exist—and for the most part peacefully so. There is enough audience to fill both the Koch Theater and the Metropolitan Opera House every night during the spring season when both companies are installed at Lincoln Center.

Sublime, austere, and scary

In the sublime category are ...