Three contrasting Balanchine works are joined by the return of a lyrical Jerome Robbins ballet. One of only two dances Balanchine choreographed to the dissonant music of modernist composer Paul Hindemith, the endearingly novel Kammermusik No. 2 features two leading couples supported by a rare all-male corps de ballet. Le Tombeau de Couperin, originally created for the 1975 Ravel Festival, is marked by a courtly grace, while Raymonda Variations presents a dazzling suite of dances set to music by Glazounov to which Balanchine returned more than once. In Antique Epigraphs, Robbins transmuted the resonant beauty of classical Greek art into a refined dance for an ensemble of women.

Requiring great energy, speed, and precision, the striking choreography in Kammermusik No. 2 echoes the intricacies of its modernist score with jagged lines and stylized gestures.

A ballet requiring great energy, speed, and precision, Kammermusik No. 2 has a complex structure that echoes the music; one of the dancers in the original cast likened it to a computer. The ballet is performed by two couples and an eight-man ensemble. The men, with their jagged lines and stylized gestures, dance to the music of the orchestra. The soloists, dancing to the complex passages for piano, are in counterpoint to the ensemble. The score is one of seven kammermusik pieces — the word “kammermusik” is German for “chamber music” — written by Hindemith between 1923 and 1933, when the composer turned to a neoclassical style evoking the Baroque.

Rooted in the court dances of 18th-century France, Le Tombeau de Couperin mesmerizes with its seamless patterns and symmetrical groupings of dancers.

In 1919 Maurice Ravel composed "Le Tombeau de Couperin” (“The Tomb of Couperin”), a commemorative suite for piano in six movements, in memory of six friends who died in World War I. He was inspired by the style of François Couperin, a French Baroque composer. In 1920, Ravel orchestrated four of the pieces, which make up the score for this ballet.

Balanchine choreographed Le Tombeau de Couperin for New York City Ballet’s 1975 Ravel Festival, and, like the composer, he incorporated French Baroque style and devices into a work with a modern sensibility. The eight couples are divided into left and right quadrilles, and each quadrille forms geometric patterns — diagonals, diamonds, squares — as they dance in unison or echo the movements of the opposite side.

Raymonda Variations is a flurry of ballet technique featuring a series of impressive solos at its center.

Balanchine admired Glazounov's score for the three-act ballet Raymonda, calling it "some of the finest ballet music we have." As a student in St. Petersburg, Balanchine danced in the Maryinsky Theatre production that had originally been choreographed by Marius Petipa.

In 1946, Balanchine and ballerina Alexandra Danilova mounted the full-length Raymonda for the Ballet Russe. Balanchine was not, however, enamored of the overly complicated storyline, and instead used excerpts from the score for several plotless works, including Pas de Dix, Cortège Hongrois, and Raymonda Variations.

Of this last one, Balanchine wrote:

To try to talk about these dances in any useful way outside the music is not possible; they do not have any literary content at all and of course have nothing to do with the story of the original ballet Raymonda. The music itself, its grand and generous manner, its joy and playfulness, was for me more than enough to carry the plot of the dances.

Raymonda was one of Petipa’s final, most successful ballets to be staged during the golden years of his career. The 1890s had seen some of the biggest highlights of Petipa’s career, which first emerged with the creation of The Sleeping Beauty. This late-era saw Petipa taking a slightly different step from what he had previously produced for the Saint Petersburg Imperial Ballet. He was now creating ballets that lacked dramatic plots and character development and were, instead, presenting new ballets that represented the grand spectacle. The ballet-féerie made its impact on the Imperial Ballet following the success of The Sleeping Beauty and materialized again in other ballets such as Cinderella and Bluebeard.

An all-female cast performs this dramatic and introspective piece, alluding to the earthy fervor and sculptural forms of Greek antiquity.

The first six sections of Antique Epigraphs are set to an orchestrated version of Six Epigraphes Antiques, music originally written as accompaniment for the prose poetry of Pierre Louÿs' Chanson de Bilitis, supposed translations of newly discovered autobiographical poetry of Sappho. The seventh section of the ballet is danced to Syrinx, a melody for unaccompanied flute.