Peter Martins, director of the company and school, invited her to create two more pieces for City Ballet and school dancers. Ms. Barak already knows how to get and keep her dancers moving and make them look good at the same time. One solo gives Carly Sebouhian a chance to display both her prodigious technique and a vividly personal presence, one that colored and fluently channeled quick shifts in direction and dynamics. Stephanie Sullivan, the other lead ballerina at both performances, was flyaway light and air to Ms. Sebouhian's surge. But soon the ballet's handsome, flowing formal patterns take over, as well as the pleasure of seeing dancing by a genuine classical ballet choreographer who knows and values the vocabulary and takes it to a level beyond mere steps.
Form is all here, unsurprisingly perhaps, given the demands of the music.
But dance breathes within the formal patterns. And Ms. Barak gives the dancers' legs as much expressive power as their upper bodies, usually the vehicle for dramatic nuance in pure-dance ballets. One looks forward to seeing more of Ms. Barak's choreography. It is a difficult ballet even for experienced dancers, and there were times when these young performers looked as if they were hurtling toward a finish line to the pushing Mozart score. But the level of dancing was nonetheless high, with the theme danced at the matinee by Maximilien Baud and Lucien Postlewaite and the variations by Julia Cherlow, Alison Basford, Randi Osetek, Ashlee Knapp, Joshua Spell and Savannah Lowery.