Paris Opera Ballet’s prowess and panache flashed into the New York State Theater on Saturday afternoon when Nicolas Le Riche, an étoile of the Parisian company, made a guest appearance with New York City Ballet, performing the Jerome Robbins solo “A Suite of Dances.” Created for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1994, “A Suite of Dances” uses a lot of the impishness as well as the moodiness of Mr. Baryshnikov’s role in “Other Dances,” which Robbins had made for him in 1976. The compact figure and nimble agility of Mr. Baryshnikov do not find an easy analogue in the tall and broad-shouldered Mr. Le Riche. While he didn’t make it look easy, Mr. Le Riche made the piece look worthwhile.

“A Suite of Dances” is not a walk in the park technically, despite the fact that Mr. Baryshnikov was 46 when it was made for him. Performed to Bach cello pieces played onstage by Ann Kim, part of its subject is, indeed, age. Robbins creates sections that show the dancer brought to the breaking point and then regrouping. Comic mileage is earned out of the dancer’s apparent flummoxing by the piling on of difficulties. His last passage becomes more and more onerous until finally Mr. Le Riche makes a characteristically Robbins “Oh, the heck with it” gesture and concludes with a cartwheel.

On Saturday’s all-Robbins bill, “A Suite of Dances” came on the heels of “2 & 3 Part Inventions,” which was created for a 1994 workshop performance of the School of American Ballet. Here the dancers take choreographed bows at the beginning of the piece and again at the end, before their real bows. They seem to ask for our indulgence in the manner of student recitals, and certainly from the first bow we’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, particularly when the ballet is performed by actual students (at NYCB it’s customarily done by professionals). The Bach piano pieces Robbins selected encouraged the choreographer to make his points with economy, and his mesh of music and steps provides good grooming for ear and sinew. The eight SAB dancers on view Saturday afternoon performed exactly as they should, giving high-caliber student performances. Their enthusiasm about being onstage supplied a key ingredient to the text of the ballet.

Robbins’s “In Memory of … ” follows the scenario dictated by composer Alban Berg, who wrote his violin concerto in 1935 to honor the memory of a friend’s teenage daughter, who had died of polio. We see Wendy Whelan dancing with Jared Angle and a circle of friends before she is claimed by a death figure in the person of Charles Askegard. Finally all three are reunited amid a celestial firmament.

The extremely explicit plotline of “In Memory of … ” seems to hamstring Robbins, but the ballet gives opportunities to the performers. During the long, expressionistic encounter between Death and the maiden, Ms. Whelan goes limp, teeters on pointe, staggers and stumbles, and slumps vanquished to the front of the stage.

Whether on Earth or in heaven, the corps de ballet used a different weight and attack in the apotheosis on Saturday. All onstage gave beatific exhilaration to the transfiguration.

“Glass Pieces,” which closed the program on Saturday, is unusual in that each of the three movements is discontinuous. An ensemble is present in all three, but the six soloists of the first movement don’t return. The slow second movement is danced by a new pair of leads. The third movement concerns the corps only.

Robbins’s long-standing interest in urban alienation is present in the first movement, where the ensemble walks rapidly, casually, heedlessly, impersonally. A dance translation of pedestrian rhythms is Robbins’s answer to the agitating whirlwinds of Philip Glass’s edgy, insistent repetitions. Abrasively, the dancers break into second position plié as if they’re blocking a sports goal. The six soloists are lost in the crowd or find themselves claiming a stage that has suddenly and inexplicably emptied.

In the slow second movement woodwinds and strings are dominant. A single-file cortege shifts across the back of the stage. Partnered by Sébastien Marcovici, Ms. Whelan seems like a wonderfully exotic fauna, perhaps a hieratic creature of mythology, latching onto ledges and grips that he supplies. Sometimes he supports her in the traditional balletic manner, sometimes they move together in tandem. Sometimes they stand stock-still. Each shifting plane or stance seems like a subtle shift in consciousness, in perspective — both theirs and ours.

In the final movement, the percussion on the soundtrack sends the ensemble power-walking in arabesque, stepping curtly on their heels. Mr. Glass throws in new instruments and new parts of the dancers become rhythmically significant. Then — abruptly — “Glass Pieces” is over.