I’d like to say that “Ghost Variations” is the finest thing Lang has done at PNB, except that sadly the recording of this program was unable to include “Her Door to the Sky,” the first ballet Lang made at PNB, in 2016. (Copyright permissions for the Britten music proved too costly.) Notably, though, all the Seattle-based press spent much more attention on “Ghost Variations,” and one can guess why. The ballet, twenty minutes long, is extraordinarily delicate and rewards many repeat viewings and research. It strikes a perfect balance between stand-alone abstraction and narrative suggestion. The inspiration here is the music of Robert and Clara Schumann—some of the last piano works Robert wrote before Clara had to commit him to an insane asylum—capped with a vocal work by Robert that Clara adapted for piano. (For this re-staging, pianist Christina Siemens played all of the music, sensitively, upstage right.) You don’t have to know that Clara Schumann was a piano prodigy, that Robert met her when she was only nine years old, that they married when she was 19, that she supported his genius lovingly even as he descended into madness. “Ghost Section’s” first five sections, for six dancers, are engrossing without any context, Reed Nakamura’s lighting suggesting impossible-to-escape mental demons as the dancers onstage are haunted by looming shadows—sometimes their own, sometimes other dancers behind a white scrim—that grow monstrously large or shrink to horrifying tininess. Kuu Sakuragi was especially emotive in a suddenly explosive solo, skittering on the floor as the shadows gave chase, falling to his knees while darkness fell.

At the same time, if you know the story of Robert and Clara, that final pas de deux is even more moving. The shadows cease. Macy, not previously featured in the ballet, appears the very embodiment of Clara Schumann—intelligent, gentle, devoted. She and Wald, her husband in real life, press their palms together, and then their foreheads. She leads him with her unfurling arms as she stretches into arabesque, then rolls across his back, and both sink in a heap to the stage like corpses into a grave. Life and art melt together in sacrificial, unconditional acceptance.

I wish I could say I found “ZigZag” as layered and thought-provoking. The New York critics were not kind to this fantasia of Tony Bennett tunes when it premiered at American Ballet Theatre in 2021, and reading the reviews from afar, the objections seemed zingily carping—this is clearly meant to be a lighthearted jazz romp that lets the dancers have fun, after all. That’s how the Seattle audience took it, hollering appreciation in McCaw Hall, and cheering the “glorious” performances of their hometown dance artists in the reviews.