A ballet with unceasing appeal, The Four Temperaments references the medieval concept of psychological humors through its classically grounded but definitively modern movement.

The score for this ballet was commissioned by George Balanchine from Paul Hindemith in 1940. The ballet, together with Ravel’s opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, constituted the opening program of Ballet Society (the direct predecessor of the New York City Ballet) on November 20, 1946. In Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, Balanchine wrote of the ballet that it “is an expression in dance and music of the ancient notion that the human organism is made up of four different humors, or temperaments. Each one of us possesses these four humors, but in different degrees, and it is from the dominance of one of them that the four physical and psychological types — melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic, and choleric — were derived …. Although the score is based on this idea of the four temperaments, neither the music nor the ballet itself makes specific or literal interpretation of the idea. An understanding of the Greek and medieval notion of the temperaments was merely the point of departure for both composer and choreographer.”

An accomplished pianist, Balanchine commissioned the score because he wanted a short work he could play at home with friends during his evening musicales. It was completed in 1940 and had its first public performance at a 1944 concert with Lukas Foss as the pianist.

This brief but captivating ballet finds a principal couple and a corps de ballet of four women in a whirl of perpetual motion set to Glinka’s swooning melodies.

The current version of Valse-Fantaisie was originally presented by New York City Ballet in 1967 as the second section of Glinkiana, which was choreographed to four different compositions of Glinka.

Balanchine had choreographed to the Valse-Fantaisie on two other occasions: in 1931 for one of Sir Oswald Stoll’s Variety Shows in London, and in 1953 for New York City Ballet. The music, roughly contemporaneous with Chopin’s waltzes, is fast and light, although it was popularly called the Melancholy Waltz.

Errante, this choreographic fantasy, begins with the sound of a plaintive violin that signals the beginning of the ballerina's five-minute solo. At its end, she is joined by her partner and four couples.

Originally titled Tzigane, after the name of Maurice Ravel’s rhapsodic score, this ballet will be revived for the first time in more than 30 years with a new name – Errante.  Choreographed by Balanchine for the legendary ballerina Suzanne Farrell for the 1975 Ravel Festival, Farrell will return to NYCB during the 75th Anniversary Season to stage the work for a new generation of NYCB dancers.

An audience favorite with showbiz glam, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue is a vampy ballet about a jealous Russian premier danseur and his hoofing American rival.

The original Slaughter on Tenth Avenue was created for the 1936 Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes, and featured Ray Bolger as "The Hoofer" and Tamara Geva as "The Stripper." The first full-scale ballet within a musical, and the first to advance the action of the show, it also introduced the word "choreography" to Broadway, at Balanchine's request. On Your Toes was also the first of four Rodgers and Hart musicals choreographed by Balanchine during the 1930s, the others being Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, and The Boys from Syracuse.

A story-within-a-story, it tells the tale of a jealous premier danseur, who hires a thug to kill a rival during the premiere of a new ballet. The ballet — Slaughter on Tenth Avenue — concerns the seedy denizens who patronize a strip joint near the New York waterfront where brawls frequently occur. Within the context of this shabby setting, a Hoofer falls in love with a Stripper and is discovered with her after closing time by the club's owner, the Big Boss, who accidentally shoots her. The "corpse" of the Stripper manages to pass a note to the Hoofer warning him of the real murder plot, and once aware that the thug, who is sitting in one of the theater's boxes, is planning to shoot him when he stops dancing, the Hoofer keeps repeating his closing phrase until the police arrive.