Three Valentine's roses from the Pennsylvania Ballet

If the florist runs out of roses for your sweetie, you'll find dozens of long-stemmed beauties in the Pennsylvania Ballet's "Love and Longing," its Valentine's Day program that began Wednesday and runs through Sunday at the Merriam Theater.

The fiery energy of Peter Martins' 1990 Fearful Symmetries, to John Adams' music of the same name, began the evening. It has long been a favorite of mine - but I may switch my allegiance to Requiem for a Rose, a world-premiere commission from the ballet by Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa.

Love may fade, but ballets never die - they're just reincarnated. Requiem is this century's fraternal twin of the Ballet Russe's Le Spectre de la Rose. Instead of opening with a male specter flying into the young girl's room, a delectable love goddess (Abigail Mentzer) contorts her snakelike arms and body to a single heartbeat in a John Hoey-designed spotlight. A sultry rose covers her mouth. As Schubert's adagio from the Quintet in C major begins, a dozen topless men and virtually topless women in blood-red rose-blooms of skirts surround her, and she disappears from the stage.

The evening's second en pointe ballet, Requiem pairs Riolama Lorenzo with Sergio Torrado and Lauren Fadely with James Ihde; Jermel Johnson and Maximilien Baud take two of the many good male roles. As 10 roses form a semicircle around Zachary Hench and Amy Aldridge, Mentzer creeps behind them to drop the rose in their midst, again to that single heartbeat. (Tatyana van Walsum designed the gorgeous costumes and surprise backdrop.)

Whenever I tune into one of those grotesque TV dance shows, I wish someone would force all involved to watch Twyla Tharp's 1982 Nine Sinatra Songs, a lesson in grace and how well-trained dancers comport themselves. The Pennsylvania Ballet does the Tharp carefully, with a more sophisticated flair than, say, Ballet Arizona, but the company doesn't hit it home as recklessly as the Washington Ballet does.

The mercurial movement of Fearful Symmetries is risky, but the piece's 23 dancers attacked with a ferocity that matched the music's velocity and demonic sense of danger, changing partners with the speed of light. Zachary Hench lifted Amy Aldridge on high as she soared across the stage, legs split wide. Most of the lifts and jumps had forward-thrusting legs and bodies torquing as if they were being blown back by some force. William Blake's "The Tyger" inspired the music's symmetries, but the following lines surely inspired Martins' choreography:

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?