This week, the New York City Ballet opens its Spring season with a quadruple bill of George Balanchine works with Nicolette Fraillon back in the orchestra pit conducting two of them for the first time.

The former Music Director and Chief Conductor of The Australian Ballet talks to Jansson J. Antmann ahead of the premiere.

Nicolette Fraillon. Photo supplied

In a whirlwind of last-minute rehearsals, Nicolette Fraillon is in her element, preparing not one but two programs for the New York City Ballet. The first is the season opener All Balanchine, which includes the choreographer’s seminal work Apollo from 1928, the Tchaikovsky Pas de deux which premiered in 1960, Ballo della Regina created in 1978 and the Chaconne from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, created in Hamburg in 1963 after the failure of his 1936 staging of the entire work at the Metropolitan Opera – in which he controversially kept the singers in the pit.

The second program is the triple bill Innovators & Icons, which opens a day later and Fraillon is overseeing in case she needs to jump in during the run. It includes Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces which will be seen...