Everyone understands that Peter Martins, who has been running the company since the death of its founder-choreographer George Balanchine 29 years ago, has an exceptionally tough assignment in honoring the company’s inheritance while also staging a greater number of new ballets than any other troupe in the world. Thursday’s spring gala at the Koch Theater at Lincoln Center illustrated both aspects of his assignment: it presented two world premieres (one by Mr. Martins himself, one by Benjamin Millepied) and then gave us a new production of Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” a ballet that, despite not having been performed since 2008, has traditionally been at the very heart of City Ballet repertory.  More often than not at these galas, Mr. Martins delivers a version of the same speech: a toast involving vodka; Balanchine and his co-founder, Lincoln Kirstein; and new choreography’s being the company’s lifeblood. It’s a gimmick, of course, but it succeeds in suggesting that Mr. Martins both understands the company’s traditions and is passionate about the new. On Thursday he gave us no speech. I can’t say I missed it, but the events onstage didn’t give his audience much to believe in.  Thursday’s gala was titled “À la Française”: Its gimmicks were Frenchness and fashion. Mr. Martins’s new ballet and the old Balanchine one are to music by French composers; Mr. Millepied is French-born; and both new ballets had designs from the fashion world: the sisters behind the Rodarte label, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, created the costumes for Mr. Millepied’s piece, and Gilles Mendel of J. Mendel designed those for Mr. Martins’s. But while “Two Hearts,” Mr. Millepied’s ballet, has the virtue of showcasing the outstanding young ballerina Tiler Peck, it and Mr. Martins’s piece were just essays in froth and charm.  A ballet is a choreographer’s view of human energy; it will demonstrate his or her philosophy. Neither of these new works shows a choreographer seriously interested in modernity. The kinds of dancing Mr. Martins and Mr. Millepied present are facile, polished and untroubling; the worlds they put onstage are exclusively heterosexual and uniformly polite.  The interesting thing about Mr. Martins’s new work, “Mes Oiseaux,” is its music, a trio for violin, cello and piano, by Marc-André Dalbavie, often characterized by contrasts of speed and dynamics between one instrument and another, building finally to a quick succession of strong structural effects. But it was hard to find evidence that Mr. Martins found it interesting. The connections in his ballet to to the music seemed superficial and arbitrary.  The cast was one man and three women, all members of the corps de ballet; the action was a halfhearted Judgment of Paris, with Taylor Stanley taking turns partnering Lauren Lovette, Ashly Isaacs and Claire Kretzschmar, as if weighing which of the women might matter most to him but unable to make up his mind.  Only Mr. Stanley gets a few steps — notably a diagonal line of changing jumps, and a final gesture upward from the floor — that seem to show Mr. Martins’s focus on making the most of his performers. He asks Ms. Lovette, Ms. Isaacs (especially) and Ms Kretzschmar to knock off various feats, but he makes them look inconsequential.  Nico Muhly’s orchestral score for “Two Hearts,” commissioned for this ballet, is efficiently charming until, for no apparent reason, it ends with a folk song whose words, grimmer as they proceed, include lines like “See how my blood comes trickling down my leg” and “O mother O mother, lay me down in a grave.” (The singer, amplified, is Dawn Landes.)  Mr. Millepied, who retired recently as a principal dancer at City Ballet, has been choreographing for several years, displaying a number of serious, professional dance-making skills without ever showing us why he choreographs. “Two Hearts,” ingratiatingly pretty, lets you know which layer of the music it has on its mind; it doesn’t, however, help you hear the music any better. A corps de ballet of six women and six men keeps coming and going, sometimes in subgroups, but why? The two skills Mr. Millepied develops here are that of creating a moderately impressive vehicle for an important dancer (Ms. Peck) and of making several sustained pas de deux (for Ms. Peck and Tyler Angle).  The ballet is at its prettiest in these duets, though they all struck me as emotionally trite, immediately merging in my mind into a single Valentine’s Day greeting card. In them Ms. Peck is perpetually supported by Mr. Angle; neither wants to break contact for a moment. As a result, it feels like quite a relief when, at other points, each is seen without the other. Mr. Angle’s gifts as a solo dancer are given very guarded exposure, but we’re shown several facets of Ms. Peck, especially in a dance with three men with a series of sudden freeze-frame effects matching pauses in the music.  When Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” had its premiere in Paris, the costumes for each of the Bizet music’s four movements had a separate color scheme. In America, however, starting with the costumes designed in 1950 by Karinska, the ballet has been uniformly in black (for the men, though at points they donned white socks) and white (for the women, who wear tutus and tiaras).  Though the costumes were not Karinska’s finest — the cut of the tutus tended to make the women look wide-waisted, and the men looked like prosaic functionaries from an inferior realm — the overall black-and-white look was thrilling.  That general look is maintained in the new designs by Marc Happel, the company’s director of costumes. He has added a high measure of diamanté sparkle, courtesy of Swarovski, and his women’s tutus have necklines that plunge to the waistline, even though the cleavage is actually covered. The change is not drastic, but it represents a move away from severity and toward prettification.  The ballet itself has changed little since its last New York performances. In Balanchine’s lifetime, in the finale when the corps de ballet women, lined on three sides of the stage, used to point their feet (battement tendu, the step most fundamental to Balanchine’s conception of ballet technique), they were seldom in perfect unison, but the step had a white-hot, galvanizing force; today it is all on the beat and all tame.  Though the second movement is not the best vehicle for Sara Mearns, her seamless legato phrasing and vibrantly dramatic projection are most welcome; Ms. Peck, in the often thankless fourth movement, phrases a line of pirouettes with breathtaking finish, closing each one with the slightest inclination of her raised hand. Ashley Bouder and Joaquin De Luz crest the air potently in the third movement. In the arduous first movement Megan Fairchild is prosaically skillful. The ballet used to be a life-enhancing festival of brio and rhythm; right now it feels neat and safe.  New York City Balletâs season continues through June 10 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 870-5570, nycballet.com.
The New York City Balletâs spring gala offered premieres by Peter Martins and Benjamin Millepied, and a return of Balanchineâs âSymphony in C.â