The New York City Ballet’s 2026 Spring Gala is one week away, and the program it carries into the David H. Koch Theater on Thursday, May 7 is among the most structurally interesting the company has assembled for a fundraising evening in recent memory. A world premiere by a principal dancer, a solo violin debut by one of the instrument’s reigning voices, and a Balanchine closing work positioned for its own anniversary milestone — the evening earns its place at the front of the spring collector and philanthropic circuit.
The Program: Three Works, One Arc
The evening’s centerpiece is Set in Stone, a world premiere choreographed by NYCB Principal Dancer Tiler Peck. It is Peck’s second commission for the company, following her 2024 Concerto for Two Pianos presented during the Winter season. The new work is set to Édouard Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole in D minor — a late-Romantic violin concerto that blends Spanish idiom with French orchestral language, composed in 1874 and dedicated to Pablo de Sarasate. The cast exceeds 30 dancers; costumes are by Robert Perdziola, who has designed for ballet, theater, and opera across three decades; lighting is by Brandon Stirling Baker, Tony Award–nominated for his work on Hamilton.
Performing the Lalo live with the NYCB Orchestra will be Hilary Hahn — three-time Grammy winner, one of the most recorded violinists of her generation, and, by her own account, not a frequent crossover artist into ballet staging. This is her debut with the company. Hahn’s appearance with a ballet orchestra is rare precisely because her concert profile has been built around recital and symphony hall settings; a gala commission like this one, where the violinist becomes the sonic anchor for a world premiere choreography, doesn’t happen often and doesn’t repeat.
The program opens with a work not yet announced in the final running order as of this writing, and closes with George Balanchine’s Diamonds — the final section of Jewels, set to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3. Diamonds is programmed in partial celebration of its approaching diamond anniversary in 2027, lending the gala a retrospective weight that anchors the evening’s theme of Set in Stone: Creation & Preservation.
The Gala Format
Doors open at 5:30 PM for a Ruinart Champagne cocktail reception on the Promenade. The performance begins at 7 PM in the Wu Tsai Theater. Following the curtain, the Promenade levels host a black-tie dinner and dancing — the extended post-performance format that distinguishes gala evenings from standard subscription programming and gives patrons the room to move between tables in a way that mirrors the social architecture of an auction preview or benefit dinner.
David H. Koch Theater is at 20 Lincoln Center Plaza. Gala tickets and table packages are available through the NYCB development office at nycballet.com.
The Calendar Position
May 7 sits in the tightest stretch of the New York spring social and arts calendar. The Met Gala is Monday, May 4 — three days before. Frieze New York opens at The Shed on Wednesday, May 13, with invitation-only VIP previews beginning May 13. TEFAF New York follows May 15–19 at Park Avenue Armory, with an 88-dealer international field and a May 14 collectors’ preview. The Sotheby’s Mnuchin Evening Auction — 11 lots, led by a $70–100 million Rothko — hammers on May 14 at 6 PM EDT, framed as the opening salvo of the New York evening sales week.
The NYCB Spring Gala on May 7 is, in calendar terms, the performing-arts anchor that opens this sequence. It occupies the same structural role that the NY Philharmonic Spring Gala (April 28, Dudamel and Kissin) played for the preceding week: a black-tie institutional evening that marks the shift from the social season’s mid-spring register into the concentrated fair-and-auction machinery of mid-May. For collectors who attend Frieze and TEFAF, and who follow the Sotheby’s contemporary sales, Thursday May 7 at Lincoln Center is the opening night of the run.
The New Combinations Fund
The gala supports NYCB’s New Combinations Fund, which has commissioned more than 200 world premieres since its founding in 1991. Tiler Peck’s Set in Stone is the Fund’s latest addition to that catalog. The philanthropic architecture of the evening — preservation of existing Balanchine repertoire alongside investment in new commissions — is the institutional logic that the gala theme makes explicit, and it is the argument the company makes to the collector donors in the room who are simultaneously navigating the acquisition market three blocks from where the evening sales will take place one week later.
