New York City Ballet Offers Two Weeks of Stravinsky New York City Ballet's production of Stravinsky and Balanchine's "Agon" in February. City Ballet is opening its season with two weeks of Stravinsky ballets. FOR over a hundred years now the music of Igor Stravinsky has been central to ballet. In 1909, while still a virtual unknown, he orchestrated a Chopin number for the ballet "Les Sylphides" as part of the opening season of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The next year Diaghilev presented the premiere of "The Firebird" with Stravinsky's new score. The 20th century certainly spawned modernist composers, but none of them matched his profound instinct for dance rhythm; and none kept on so restlessly unlocking aspects of the new. Ana Sophia Scheller, left, and Tiler Peck of New York City Ballet in "Apollo." From then on Stravinsky went on working with choreographers and ballet companies for more than 50 years. Like an explorer he investigated different regions of art - primitivism, Neo-Classicism, serialism and others - and he often did so in successive scores for ballet. "Petrushka" (1911), "The Rite of Spring" (1913), "Pulcinella" (1920), "Les Noces" (1923), "Apollo" (1928), "Orpheus" (1948), "Agon" (1957) - all works with scores by him - were rites of passage through which ballet kept becoming modern. This week New York City Ballet opens its fall season with two weeks of ballets choreographed to Stravinsky music, between 1928 and 1972, by the company's founder-choreographer, George Balanchine. Balanchine came of age as an artist in 1928 when he choreographed the European premiere of Stravinsky's "Apollo." When he moved to New York, Stravinsky's music stayed central to his endeavor. For Balanchine there were only three composers who knew the secret of dance music or, as he put it, "musique dansante": Delibes ("Coppélia," "La Source"), Tchaikovsky ("Swan Lake," "The Sleeping Beauty," "The Nutcracker") and Stravinsky. That secret involved aspects of rhythm that connected to the point work and brio of ballet, a feeling for the male-female chivalry that lies at the heart of ballet's romance, and a sense of the suspense that turns ballet into drama. When the Stravinsky-Balanchine "Orpheus" had its premiere in 1948, its aura of genius was so potent that it proved a central reason for the founding of New York City Ballet later that year. "Agon" was at once recognized as a beacon of radical modernity. It opened as part of a triple bill of "Greek" ballets, with "Apollo" and "Orpheus"; City Ballet's season starts with that historic program on Tuesday. But composing dance scores was only half the Stravinsky-ballet adventure. One of the breakthroughs of 20th-century choreography was its revelatory discovery of concert music, so that ballets to concertos, symphonies and other works never intended for dance were expanded onstage in dance terms. Between 1941, when Balanchine first choreographed Stravinsky's violin concerto as "Balustrade," and 1982, when (the year before his death) he staged his third, and City Ballet's second, Stravinsky festival, he married Stravinsky's concert scores to his own new choreography. For many people this was where ballet truly entered the abstract. But Balanchine, like other choreographers, refused to accept that there can be abstraction when there are humans onstage. What Stravinsky's music helped him to discover was uncharted regions of drama. When Stravinsky saw the new pure-dance work that Balanchine set to his "Movements for Piano and Orchestra" in 1963, he said that the ballet had helped him understand his own music better: he had designed the floor plan but Balanchine had built the building. "Movements" makes drama out of man versus woman, male-female couple against all-female group, symmetry versus asymmetry. The orthodoxy of ballet language is interspersed with forms and figures so novel that they seem anticlassical. You follow it on many levels at once - rhythm, spatial architecture, gender, body language - and, like Stravinsky himself, hear the music better in consequence.