The allegro from a Bach violin concerto is playing. The melody line zigzags its way up and down the scale, fast and urgent. A girl dashes from the wings and hurls herself into a baseball slide. Another girl follows, the headlong flood of notes sweeping her across the floor and right off the stage.

The scene is from “Esplanade,” possibly the most beloved of the 18 works to be performed at the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s annual three-week season starting tonight at City Center. “Esplanade” is also one of four dances in the City Center lineup set to Bach. This is good news for dance audiences, who are by now well aware of the extraordinary effects of Bach’s music on Mr. Taylor’s imagination.

The idea of Mr. Taylor choreographing to Bach, so inevitable now, was bizarre and even objectionable in 1961, when he set “Junction” (not on the bill at City Center) to Violoncello Suites 1 and 4. For right-thinking modern dancers, Mr. Taylor’s use of baroque music (notably in 1962’s smash hit “Aureole,” set to Handel) was tantamount to selling out to establishment tastes. “Modern dances weren’t supposed to use baroque music,” Mr. Taylor recalled last year during a roundtable discussion honoring the company’s 50th anniversary. “It was going against the grain. Modern dance was basically expressionistic at that time.”

Mr. Taylor broke with orthodoxy again when he used Bach’s music for “Esplanade” in 1975. Even for modern dance, the sight of dancers doing baseball slides and crawling around the stage to the Double Violin Concerto was shocking. The dance’s natural movements – walking, skipping, running, pointing – were alarmingly natural, perhaps not even “dance.” Yet in that human-scaled simplicity lays the enduring appeal of “Esplanade.” Fresh even now, it has the ability to make people feel as if the delight they experience on an ordinary summer day might deserve to be scored by Bach.

Mr. Taylor’s pleasure in responding to Bach’s intricate patterns is strikingly evident in “Esplanade.” The response may be playful – throwing a girl into her partner’s arms smack on a high note, or famously sending that marvel, Lisa Viola, around and around in circles, her feet a glorious blur. But Mr. Taylor also finds dance forms for the pathos and beauty in the adagio sections, in gestures as simple as a gentle, measured walk.

“Esplanade,” whose pleasures seem to expand and grow more moving with each viewing, is a feature of nearly every Taylor season. The chance to see 1988’s “Brandenburgs” this year at City Center, in contrast, is a rare one; the dance was last performed in New York in 1997. The brisk tempos of the Brandenburg allegros are enough to make any dancer groan. The task of transposing the pace of the violinist’s flying fingers to the dancer’s feet is sobering. Yet the Brandenburgs have irresistible attractions for a dance maker: lively inter play between soloist and chamber orchestra, brilliantly clear counterpoint, and the pervasive, exhilarating sense of the chase.

For music with such rigorously parallel structure, Mr. Taylor – ever the subversive – has chosen an asymmetrical number of dancers: nine. The all-male corps of five dancers swirls around the four soloists. These four have their own off-kilter structure, with the three elegant women doting upon the lone prince.

But costuming and courtly affect are window dressing here. The dance’s pure, exercise-like qualities have prompted comparisons to Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco”; spatial relations and patterns are central preoccupations. While “Esplanade” radiates humanity, the straightforward “Brandenburgs” is a cold, cerebral work. As in “Esplanade,” “Brandenburgs” offers the abstract enjoyment of watching Mr. Taylor’s mind reacting, phrase by phrase, to Bach’s architecture.

Absent from New York for five years, the lyrical “Cascade” (1999), to music from three Bach keyboard concertos, also returns this season. “Cascade” is a dance made from muscular, buoyant steps – jumps with free-swinging arms, falls and recoveries, exuberant leaps and turns. But there’s also an aching adagio solo, almost a visual manifestation of those two Bach essentials, passion and restraint.

In one memorable sequence, two couples dance in shadow. Both are doing the same movements, but the man in each pair is dancing the same steps as the woman in the opposite pair. Apart from their narrative power, the mirrored movements in “Cascade” have an unexpected musicality, subtly echoing Bach’s own call-and-answer structure.

At this point, four years after its premiere, the wildly popular “Promethean Fire” can safely be declared a classic. Big, bold, even monumental, “Promethean Fire” has every chance to trip over its own ambitions – and yet time and again, it rises. Much has been made of its 16 dancers, clad in black bodysuits with gold stripes, falling into a heap of bodies, arms straggling limply over the edges. To some it is an image of September 11 (to me, it has rather the macabre tinge of Goya). As for the incorrigible Mr. Taylor, he insists the inspiration is Walt Disney’s “Fantasia,” the source of the opening cut of music, which is Leopold Stokowski’s arrangement of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

The music is almost staggeringly grand, and Mr. Taylor keeps the curtain down for the first few bars to build the suspense. This first gesture is charged with Mr. Taylor’s affinity with Bach. He wants the music on its own; he wants the viewer to absorb the music’s monumental grandeur before glimpsing the dancers.

And when you do see them, what a sight it is: a swarm of men and women, weaving and darting in and out of patterns. There are intricate rotating circles and pinwheel formations. They spin and careen across the stage, missing each other by inches. And then the music slows and they collapse, exhausted, in a pile.

Some dances provoke laughter, some bring tears; “Promethean Fire” induces gasps. In the slow duet, performed to an orchestrated version of the Prelude in Eflat minor, a girl flies backward through the air – and somehow, her partner catches her. The danger that is inherent in Mr. Taylor’s choreography – he is always pushing dancers to the edge – hits you all the harder for being juxtaposed against that slow, deliberate melody. And nothing could be more fitting for the triumphant finale than to see the figure of a woman rising up, up from the pile as the last chord reverberates.

For some tastes, “Promethean Fire” may be too much like “Fantasia” – too right on the notes, too literal. Yet even as one marvels at the dancers’ ability to match the flurries of notes, a larger architecture appears – constructed piece by piece from a wealth of small designs. Just as Bach built instrument by instrument, staff by staff, Mr. Taylor is deftly arranging his own moving parts. And as always with Mr. Taylor’s special alchemy, what he feeds the eye changes how the ear hears Bach.

Until March 19 (130 W. 56th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-581-1212).