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Some great and some lacklustre performances in the Jerome Robbins triple bill on opening night of New York City Ballet's winter season – and a missed opportunity.   

Audience response for all three ballets was extremely enthusiastic. From 1944 to 1997, Jerry knew how to please audiences.

Who knew that children were subject to shoe fetishes?

The Minnesota Chorale does Leonard Bernstein and Sir William Walton proud, with the Bernstein Chichester Psalms a particularly impressive presentation.  

In Milwaukee, Fabien Gabel pairs a Classical concerto with brilliant orchestral showpieces by Bernstein, Ravel and Florent Schmitt.

Guest Conductor Peter Oudjian teams with Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and concertmaster David Coucheron to perform Saint-Saëns’s Third Violin Concerto.

BalletNOW returns to the Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center in Los Angeles. The production features dancers from six different major ballet companies, but fails to impress.

Sterling Hyltin owns The Concert and seems to be having the best time of anybody onstage.

The Sydney Symphony invited a Big Band, the Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra with its leader, Wynton Marsalis to join forces for a week, and in this concert, the delighted audience quickly realised that ‘all you gotta do is swing’.

Released from the Covent Garden pit, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House enjoyed its moment on the stage, breathing in the sea breezes of Ravel and Chausson, strutting its stuff in Bernstein and basking in shimmering Scriabin.

Soon to retire principal ballerinas, Julie Kent and Xiomara Reyes, delivered poignant performances in Alexei Ratmansky's Seven Sonatas along with poetic dancing by Joseph Gorak. Other standouts included solist Devon Teuscher in the Raymonda Divertissements and James Whiteside in Fancy Free.

From lifelong fans to the previously uninitiated, New York City Ballet’s All Robbins program was designed to make the whole house cheer. Jerome Robbins’ (1918–98) work on Broadway and in ballet made him a revered artist in both circles. Few others were ever able to achieve such crossover success.