The flashbacks were well chosen. There was the truncated conclusion of William Forsythe’s high-voltage take on a high-school prom, “The Second Detail,’’ with Erica Cornejo as the Carrie-like outsider. Jeffrey Cirio was a contained “Golden Idol’’ from “La Bayadère’’; Sarah Wroth, Sabi Varga, and Altan Dugaraa exploded as that same ballet’s irrepressible Indians. Particularly welcome were the excerpt from Jorma Elo’s “Double Evil,’’ all obsession at first, then heartbreak, and Jerome Robbins’s “Antique Epigraphs,’’ a mystery play for women, with Cornejo excelling in the “Egyptian’’ section.
The one preview saw Lia Cirio and Nelson Madrigal perform the pas de deux from Michel Fokine’s Chopin ballet “Les Sylphides,’’ which the company will present in February as part of its “Simply Sublime’’ program. The Boston Ballet Orchestra under Jonathan McPhee was dreamily poetic in Chopin’s C-sharp-minor waltz, and Cirio and Madrigal looked happy to follow suit.
The big party piece was “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,’’ which George Balanchine set in 1960 to nine minutes of discarded Black Swan music that Tchaikovsky had written for “Swan Lake.’’ Tentative fish dives aside, James Whiteside and Misa Kuranaga provided the requisite circus thrills. And lead couple Adiarys Almeida and Joseph Gatti brought brio and an easy virtuosity to Marius Petipa’s “Carnival in Venice.’’
DePalo’s three short pieces served as palate-cleansing modern-dance interludes. “Serenata Morisca’’ is a skirt-swirling, ankle-belled number from Moorish Spain; “Lamentation’’ is Graham’s famous seated dance in which the agonized performer seems to be trying to burst out of her mortal coil. It was “Satyric Festival Dance’’ that let DePalo show off, however: dressed in the striped outfit of the Pueblo Indian koshare, or clown, she bounced, hopped, shimmied, and flung her long blond hair back and forth.
The evening ended with a “grand défilé,’’ in the style of the one that opens each Paris Opera Ballet season, where the dancers parade onstage, starting with the students in the company school and working up to the principals, and people applaud their particular favorites. The audience cheered but wasn’t quite worked up enough to call out individual names. Maybe next year.
Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com.
