Alastair Macaulay, in the New York Times, reviews the work in 2008, performed by NYCB, Macaulay at his most inspired:
I marvel in particular to watch and hear the many strangenesses with which Balanchine answers Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements.” He makes you hear the music better, and yet he often does so by springing masterstrokes that seem musically unbidden, by letting other musical features pass by undanced and by drawing us deep into musical meters and sonorities that seem minor at the time (until we feel their part in a larger structural drama we hadn’t seen coming). Meanwhile, the ballet’s engines and geometries and gestures, its mix of 20th-century American manners and traditional Oriental manners, add up to one of his most audaciously poetic inventions.
I marvel in particular to watch and hear the many strangenesses with which Balanchine answers Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements.” He makes you hear the music better, and yet he often does so by springing masterstrokes that seem musically unbidden, by letting other musical features pass by undanced and by drawing us deep into musical meters and sonorities that seem minor at the time (until we feel their part in a larger structural drama we hadn’t seen coming). Meanwhile, the ballet’s engines and geometries and gestures, its mix of 20th-century American manners and traditional Oriental manners, add up to one of his most audaciously poetic inventions.