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When you see George Balanchine's beautiful and enigmatic Chaconne, it's useful to remember that Gluck's opera, Orfeo, has a happy ending: Eurydice is regained. The ballet begins in a limitless space to music designated as the Dance of the Blessed Spirits from the Elysian Fields scene in the opera's second act - a scene in which Orpheus is united with Eyridice as in a dream. The extraordinary duet that Balanchine has made for Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins also seems to be happening in a dream. They dance slowly and delicately, almost as if trying to remember how to dance together. Their energy is like that used by dancers when they mark quietly through a dance, humming to themselves, barely indicating some of the steps. They seem to hear or feel, more often than see, each other. The space is blue and softly lit; the dancers are in white, and her vaguely Grecian tunic floats in the wake of the movement. You're scarcely aware of choreography, only of tendrils of movement the dancers curl around each other. A couple of times, as I remember, he dips her down and slides her along on her toes, but instead of immediately swooping her up again, he pauses, leaving her almost horizontal to the ground for a second before helping her to twine around and rise. Moments like this, that you can almost read as awkward - or perhaps tentative - make the dance seem not only tender, but ineffably poignant.

Martins carries Farrell away, while she keeps unfolding her front leg over and over, climbing the air. Then, a shock of golden light and horns. The court arrives to celebrate - a corps de ballet of 19 garlanding the stage, soloists entering in groups. The men are all wearing white shirts and tights, the women plain white tunics, yet they suggest courtiers playing gods and goddesses in the guise of rococo shepherds and shepherdesses. The variations are all airy - a gracious trio for Renée Estopinal, Jay Jolley and Wilhelmina Frankfurt, all in a line. While he dances, he mimes playing a lute, imparting a Watteauesque fragrance to the proceedings. The decorum, if not the actual steps, suggests 18th-century court dances. The same goes for what might almost be a sprightly galliard for Susan Hendl and Jean-Pierre Frohlich and a crisp quintet for Elise Flagg and four equally small, spry women who echo her steps.

Nothing really prepares you for the second duet of Farrell and Martins. Her hair is up, and they both look happy and thoroughly awake - the royal pair at the heart of this festive dance. But everything they do is more daring than anything that has come before, or the grand finale that closes the ballet. It is, of course, partly due to the two performers' marvelously supple phrasing and the generous scale of their dancing that they look twice as vivid as anyone else; but Balanchine has created some remarkable dancing for them. Martins's solo passages are full of smooth, dexterous footwork, and the way he keeps shifting his focus gives you the illusion of seeing many facets of the movement. Farrell's solos involve curious relevés on one toe, in which her gestureleg flicks softly out in unpredictable directions while her arms or body curl into positions so extreme that you wonder how it is that she isn't pulled off balance. As in much rococo art, the skeletal structure is so slim it almost vanishes, and you simply see dancing unfurling in scrolls and tendrils and sprays. The dancing for the corps de ballet frames this, but cannot quite match the flexibility, the radiant vitality of the dancing for Farrell and Martins. It's as if triumphant love (and choreographic inspiration) had made this Orpheus and Eurydice more luminous than the rest of humanity. Nobody in the New York City Ballet has ventured as boldly as Farrell into this sinuous, beyond-technique range of dancing. Young Nina Fedorova, cast as Sacred Love in Ashton's Illuminations, in reaching for Farrell's almost offhand sort of poeticism, quite literally fell off balance one night. This may be fanciful - I frequently am - but I can see Chaconne as Balanchine's choreographic acknowledgement of Farrell's return to the company - first as a shadowy and tentative image, then, newly intrepid, gleaming at the center of a constellation of dancers. A truly happy ending.