"Apollo," "Orpheus" and "Agon" at City Ballet At the start of Tuesday night's New York City Ballet performance the curtain rose on Robert Fairchild in the title role of George Balanchine's oldest surviving ballet, "Apollo." In this seminal work you see the young god discovering art; and Mr. Fairchild plays the ballet, coolly but keenly, as an adventure. His performance made an auspicious start for City Ballet's four-week fall season at the David H. Koch Theater. The version of "Apollo" City Ballet dances is based on the text that Balanchine arranged at the end of his life, featuring just four dancers: Apollo and the muses Terpsichore, Polyhymnia and Calliope. Tiler Peck's ebullient performance as Polyhymnia, already brilliant a year ago, was wonderful to see again; and the dancing of Ana Sophia Scheller, one of the company's newest principal dancers, as Calliope was on the high level of accomplishment that we've already come to expect from her. But Mr. Fairchild carried the ballet. The rawness with which his torso lurches off balance here and there catches the newness at the heart of this story, in which art is happening for the first time; and the rhythmic immediacy with which he dances to music has elements of play, authority and explosiveness. Equally heartening were the improvements in Sterling Hyltin's Terpsichore, the muse who becomes Apollo's chief partner. She has acquired firmness without losing spontaneity. Her arm positions still need to acquire more formal grace, but her new mixture of grandeur and impulsiveness is highly engaging. I can't help hoping that City Ballet will try staging the fuller text of "Apollo." A few other companies, like American Ballet Theater, still dance this older, longer version, with its prologue, its final ascent of Parnassus, and its three supplementary characters. It would particularly suit Mr. Fairchild. In general it would be good to see this company, the world's foremost exponent of Balanchine choreography, experiment with different texts of his ballets over the seasons. Heaven knows Balanchine kept tinkering with many of them. The drama of the uncut "Apollo" covers a wider scope, and its closing image is much more thrillingly expansive. When theater and opera companies stage works by Shakespeare, Mozart, Verdi, Chekhov, they do not always keep to a single text as gospel: we know alternative versions of "Hamlet," "Don Giovanni," "Don Carlos." Other American companies dance different versions of Balanchine's "Serenade" and other works that are usually excluded from City Ballet fare. Few New Yorkers now remember Balanchine's "Serenade" danced without the women loosening their hair for the final Elegy. Tuesday's "Apollo" was fresh, but not great; Clotilde Otranto, conducting, gave it pace without incisiveness. It was, however, the evening's main event. This program, the historic Greek trilogy in which "Apollo" was followed by "Orpheus" (1948) and "Agon" (1957), started a two-week run of ballets by Balanchine to Stravinsky music. The first two ballets retell myths about art; in "Agon" - a climax of modernism - art and history come around in ultramodern terms. When it was first performed in 1948 Balanchine's "Orpheus" carried a charge of genius that played a signal role in the foundation of New York City Ballet later that year. But that aura faded during the 1950s; to many it seemed a relic by the time it was revived for the company's 1972 Stravinsky festival. Certainly it - not just the choreography but the Isamu Noguchi designs - looked largely quaint when I first watched it in 1980. Quaint it remains. On Tuesday, Ask la Cour was a blank, perfunctory Orpheus, Wendy Whelan a politely alert Eurydice, Amar Ramasar a dully enigmatic Dark Angel. Who in today's City Ballet have the nervous systems to reanimate this dolorous, gesture-heavy choreography? Andrews Sill conducted; and, as always, the features that proved most haunting are the slow, eloquent opening and ending of Stravinsky's score. There are problems with City Ballet's "Agon" too, though far less pronounced. You can still see that this is an extraordinary ballet; its high-density pure-dance tensions still make a remarkable conclusion to this program. But the opening and concluding ensembles are too regular in their rhythm. Daniel Capps, who has recently joined the company as a permanent conductor, kept the difficult score lucid; it's the dancing that needs more brio and vibrancy. And the lead roles are danced in ways that point in different directions. Andrew Veyette's bold assertiveness in the first pas de trois is refreshing but at times steps over into brashness. By contrast Rebecca Krohn's secure, precise dancing in the second pas de trois stays bland. Maria Kowroski is physically spectacular in the pas de deux, with Sébastien Marcovici a full-textured partner; but this duet feels like a series of individual feats, without larger momentum. Performances of recent years suggest that later programs of this Balanchine-Stravinsky season will amount to more. New York City Ballet's season continues through Oct. 14 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 496-0600, nycballet.com.