Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Lincoln Center, New York

An experimental choreographer I know once noted approvingly that, though Balanchine relished his mass appeal, he was fundamentally “a weirdo”. The Russian does not get any weirder than Stravinsky Violin Concerto, one of the few ballets he made that he admitted admiring. “It is very good,” he told a friend at its 1972 premiere. “The other works [in the Stravinsky Festival, including six more of his own] – not so good.”

This son of Agon (reprised at New York City Ballet in the season’s final week) takes modernist astringency to mannerist extremes. The product of the same space age as those ubiquitous minimalist pictograms – stick figure for “men’s room”, zigzag for “stairs” – Stravinsky Violin Concerto distils ballet gesture so far down that it becomes its opposite: ornament. The corps’ every flexed wrist and jaunty trot this weekend was fluorescent with inscrutability.

The ballet’s structure is also rife with paradox. For instance, Stravinsky’s toccata chugs towards a destination that seems always just around the bend. Balanchine translates this odd yoking of locomotive progress and regularly deferred gratification into mathematically neat groupings – each of the four soloists appears first with four corps members of the opposite sex, then with four of the same sex – that add up to a single extended exhalation of exhilarating dancing.

The most celebrated and stirring oddity is the back-to-back duets. Rebecca Krohn and Sebastien Marcovici’s contorted interactions stretched their bodies like toffee. And yet they seemed comfortably insulated from one another – oblivious to the strain. To the concerto’s one heartbreaking melody, Ask la Cour and Janie Taylor faced each other with limbs in Xs like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, without cover or shame. In this tender and disturbing pas de deux, la Cour provided the motor for Taylor’s movement and even occasionally offered his limbs as prostheses. He knelt at her feet, grasping her knock-knees adoringly. He turned her as if on a spit, his big palm on her tiny ribs. We experience the neurotic mystery of their attachment as if through the wrong end of a telescope – tiny and faraway.

Stravinsky Violin Concerto exposes Balanchine as much as these lovers. That he encouraged friends to see it and brought it to the Soviet Union on his first trip back reveals just how much strange experiment mattered to him.

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