City Ballet Focuses on Robbins at Koch Theater New York City Ballet Tyler Angle, center, and company members in "All Robbins" at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on Friday. When the curtain rises on Jerome Robbins's "In G Major," the first of three works on the "All Robbins" program performed by New York City Ballet on Friday at the David H. Koch Theater, the setting is simple but unmistakable. Stylized designs on the backdrop evoke sun, sea and sky. Young people gambol about in costumes resembling chic bathing wear. We're at the French Riviera, between the wars. At the dance's premiere during the 1975 Ravel Festival the place and time it evoked weren't so specific. The Riviera designs were contributed by Erté for a Paris Opera Ballet production of the work later that year and not adopted by City Ballet until 1984. They add a Continental overlay to what is essentially another Robbins portrait of American youth at play. To the sections of Ravel's piano concerto that sound like Gershwin, Robbins responds with the Broadway fun of which he was a master. It's as much "High Button Shoes" as "Les Biches." The ending is much the same, but the duet in the middle is more distinctive. On Friday, Maria Kowroski and Tyler Angle danced it beautifully. In the ballet's opening section Ms. Kowroski, passed among men, had seemed a bit unsure of her footing, as if really on sand. With Mr. Angle's reliable support the shakiness disappeared. Floating securely on her adagio technique, she remained a little abstracted, yet appealingly so, dazed perhaps by the sun. Taking a few steps toward Mr. Angle, then a few steps away, those previously unsteady feet of hers turned eloquently ambivalent. Later, when she repeated the pattern on point, plain articulation - Robbins's and Ms. Kowroski's - found another level of expression. The structure of "In Memory Of ..." is more linear, paralleling the program of Berg's Violin Concerto, the death and transfiguration of a young woman. But its central pas de deux is also its high point. Dancing that duet on Friday, Ask la Cour brought to the death figure an effectively sinister slinkiness. As the woman in his clutches, Wendy Whelan resisted, but with a sense of futility. Such a resignation to fate is built into the duet's final moments, but Ms. Whelan carried it all the way through. In the work's folkish opening section Ms. Whelan established herself credibly as a woman half her age. Yet the hesitancy with which she joined the dances of her peers had a haunted quality, a beyond-her-years awareness of how things would end. The score tells us this, as do the steps - Robbins created the role for Suzanne Farrell at a similar stage in her career. But Ms. Whelan, in her consistent, quiet way, makes it her own. In the concluding apotheosis, wandering with her hair down among angels in white, she was as believable as anyone could be. For Robbins's classic comedy "The Concert" believability demands some self-parody. That's the price of a laugh. As the ingénue on Friday, Sterling Hyltin seemed to understand that, trading endearingly on her sunny freshness, her butterfly quality. The rest of the cast, including Joaquin De Luz as the cigar-chomping Groucho character, was just as fine, earning the laughter that the audience, primed to react to these very old jokes, would have given anyway.