Pennsylvania Ballet hasn’t had a full season in New York in two decades, although it was included in last year’s Fall for Dance season at City Center. On Wednesday the company’s week-long return to New York, again at City Center, opened with the first of two programs that hardly convey the breadth of the company’s current repertory. The opening night program consisted of just two works: Balanchine’s “Serenade,” and a new setting of “Carmina Burana” by Matthew Neenan, a former company dancer who is now its resident choreographer.

Pennsylvania Ballet was founded in 1963 by Barbara Weisberger, a product of Balanchine’s School of American Ballet. Ms. Weisberger’s connections to Balanchine gave the company access to the Balanchine works that became its core repertory. The company’s current artistic director, Roy Kaiser, has led the company since 1993. Its return to New York was not only a chance to sample its modern accomplishments, but to reflect upon the changing landscape of ballet in this country over the past 20 years.

At the time of Pennsylvania Ballet’s last season here, there seemed to be a clear-cut distinction between New York troupes and regional or civic companies around the country. The out-of-towners would usually have less-than-ideal physiques, and their style would be more truncated and technically less polished. Regional companies also often pandered to popular taste.

But now the distinctions are no longer so prevalent and apparent. There are more and more proficient dancers and fewer jobs, so it’s more likely that exceptional people can wind up anywhere. And what has always been true is much more so now: that the most elite companies can sink into provincialism almost as easily as the provincial ones. In the scramble to survive, ballet is unfortunately setting its sights lower: Everyone’s trying to get accessible and that’s a short-term solution that doesn’t work to the long-term benefit either of ballet style or of audience appreciation.

On Wednesday night, Pennsylvania Ballet escaped this fate, performing a successful “Serenade,” which doesn’t tolerate any pandering. The dancers are bacchantes, or descendents of 19th-century romantic sylphs, or briskly expansive new world technicians, but they are always residents of a universe that could only be inherited from ballet at its most exalted. The leads on Wednesday were Julie Diana, Amy Aldridge, and Arantxa Ochoa, partnered by Sergio Torrado and James Ady. They, as well as the corps de ballet, understood Balanchine’s style and never performed it by rote. If the style and articulation seemed at times a mite downsized, that was probably due to the fact that City Center’s stage is a bit small for “Serenade,”

Mr. Neenan’s “Carmina Burana” received its world premiere earlier this year. For years, the company performed John Butler’s version, made in 1959, before deciding to commission a new setting. Mr. Neenan’s choreographic design largely ignores the intermittent requests for repose that the score demands. So while the dancers worked tirelessly and skillfully, their labors did not pay off as well as they should have.

The music, however, was excellent. For Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” score, New York Choral Society singers were grouped in the pit and squeezed into the bridge from stage to auditorium. On stage, pagan and Christian articles of faith were recited by the entire thirty-odd ranks of the company, but the piece seemed more than anything a relentlessly busy exercise in step-propulsion. Its character and organization derived as much as anything from the costume designs of Oana Botez-Ban, who clothed regiments of dancers, ranging from men and women in knit tubes that flared into long trains that could be wrapped around the dancers’ partners, to temptresses dressed in red, to women in bustled tiers of tulle and long black gloves who pecked their way pneumatically around the stage. Occupying a great deal of the stage space as well as the choreographer’s imagination was a rigging structure that could be sails on a Homeric voyage or just as easily become a primordial cavern.

Until November 18 (West 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-581-1212).