Who Cares?, Lincoln Center, New York

“If you need a tonic/And the need is chronic,” the Gershwins tunefully advised, “Grab a cab and go down/To where the band is playing” – or just listen to the rest of the song. “Sweet and Low Down” soon lets loose some serious razzle-dazzle. The Gershwin catalogue – which includes the 16 standards that Hershy Kay orchestrated for Balanchine’s 1970 Who Cares? – regularly invokes introspection and melancholy only to chase them away with blitheness, suavity or wishful thinking.

The combination would seem ideal for Balanchine, a master at expressing heartbreak without an iota of mawkishness and a true believer in the power of sublimation. And it is perfect as long as he is responding to the most loaded tunes in the medley, “The Man I Love”.

The smoky song’s dreamy, desperate singer is certain that the man she imagines loving exists – she only needs to run into him. “Maybe I shall meet him Sunday, maybe Monday, maybe not. Still I’m sure to meet him one day . . . ” Balanchine emphasises the empty stage between his man in black (on opening night of New York City Ballet’s six-week winter season, the All-American charmer Robert Fairchild) and his woman in white (a translucent Tiler Peck). The dancers orbited each other, mirroring each other’s simple, expansive steps, before he carried her on his back like a fallen star, her legs the prongs. Balanchine believes the singer – that something she wants this badly must have been written in the stars.

Balanchine tends to let the score take the emotional lead. So when a tune’s quotient of sadness shrinks – and none devastates like “The Man I Love” – he falls back on a rather abstract problem of equivalencies: what in classical dance corresponds to jazz rhythms? The dancers executed many simple classroom steps, except with charming flyaway flourishes.

Who Cares? is never boring – not with this ensemble’s pizzazz and lightness, and Sara Mearns’s strange, implosive solo to “Fascinatin’ Rhythm”. But the ballet is more Astaire – elegant, unflappable and lacking emotional dimension – than Gershwin. Balanchine appreciated the unreflective American spirit: “Don’t think, dance,” he urged dancers worrying over steps. And he certainly could plumb heartache. But I am not sure he understood how pluck and misery fit together for the Gershwins – for Americans.

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