The Dance: Sight Welded to Sound

It was a long way from Swan Lake, and it drew a few boos on opening night at Lincoln Center last week, but George Balanchine's new ballet is added proof of the inventiveness of the nation's No. 1 choreographer.

With a memorably unpronounceable title that sounds rather like the medical diagnosis of an awful disease, Metastaseis & Pithoprakta was named after two works by far-out Greek-born Composer lannis Xenakis, 45. Each member of the orchestra has a totally different part, and the resulting sounds are more like electronic than man-made music—a succession of crepitations, squeaks, creaks and mutterings, punctuated by...

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