When George Balanchine’s Symphonie Concertante was revived in 1983, it had not been seen since 1952, the year Balanchine let it drop from the New York City Ballet repertory. It was American Ballet Theatre that brought the work back to the stage, not, as one would expect, the New York City Ballet. And it was a ballet that even in its day divided viewers: you either got it (Edwin Denby: “delicate girlish, flower-freshness”) or you didn’t (John Martin: “perhaps Balanchine’s most boring work”). Because of these facts, the revival of Symphonie Concertante was controversial. Why was the ballet going to ABT, a company that couldn’t hope to perform it as young Balanchine dancers had? And if Balanchine chose to let it go, some argued, why shouldn’t we? After all, he’d choreographed it as a one-off for a single student performance in 1945, a program with the National Orchestral Society called Adventure in Ballet. True, two years later, in 1947, he set it on Ballet Society (which would become the New York City Ballet in 1948), but as Maria Tallchief has said of Symphonie Concertante’s introduction into the repertory, “I was the only one who had danced professionally. Tanaquil Le Clercq was a student, and everyone in the corps de ballet was a student. What he was doing was making the clarity of Mozart’s music visible: he was teaching us how to dance. The style is very pure. There is no margin for error. You can’t veer