Peck and Angle’s delicacy carried the show, which felt like one long ballet instead of two. “The Four Temperaments,” begins with a man and woman standing alone on the stage. He offers her his hand and she takes it—the classic drawing room invitation to a dance. It is as polite and conventional a beginning to a ballet as can be. Oddly enough, the beginning of “Liebeslieder,” seems like a midpoint—the four couples are frozen in the middle of the dance floor and suddenly come to swooshing life as if someone pressed “un-pause” on a remote. This ball is already in full swing. But the end of the ballet is clearly delineated: the couples reenter in their original costumes and shoes and sit to watch the musicians play the final song, Zum Schluß. When it is over, they clap as the curtain falls. On this night, “4Ts” felt almost like a prelude to “Liebeslieder”; it rather completed the structure.       

Instead of the thrilling contrast I had anticipated, these works read as variations on a theme. It is true that they are intrinsically connected. The angular austerity that follows that courteous opening in the “4Ts” is not an ideological departure from the ballroom realm, but a stylistic one. The “4Ts” vocabulary is extreme, but its format is musical, orderly, and hierarchical. The abstract Balanchine of the “4Ts” and the sentimental Balanchine of “Liebeslieder” coexisted harmoniously—he was not Jekyll and Hyde. But he was devilish in his details. These ballets should not look so similar, even though they share DNA. (There is overlap everywhere: that low pelvis grip in “Liebeslieder” could slot in easily to the “4Ts,” it takes great finesse to make it look like the tender cradling of a womb.) Peck and Angle did their part on Tuesday night by committing to one end of the Balanchine spectrum. Now the “4Ts” dancers need to throw themselves into demonstrating the other.