What would Balanchine say? New York City Ballet, at Sadler’s Wells, reviewed

It’s been 16 years since New York City Ballet appeared in London, and its too-brief visit to Sadler’s Wells offered a welcome chance to encounter a previously unseen range of repertory and personnel. Perhaps the company can never be what it was when I first saw it as a youngster – its founder George Balanchine still in charge, the likes of Suzanne Farrell and Edward Villella in their prime – but one cannot live off misty memories and what has emerged now certainly has living, evolving force.

Yet the evening’s highlight for me had to be its ‘heritage’ element – the exquisite performance by Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley of Balanchine’s mysteriously beautiful miniature Duo Concertant from 1972. Two dancers stand behind a pianist and violinist playing a suite by Stravinsky. They scarcely move at first: they are listeners, waiting for the spirit to descend. And when it does, they seem to be friends wittily improvising rather than lovers absorbed in a romantic pas de deux.