The annual Youth America Grand Prix gala, held at City Center, doesn’t operate under deluxe conditions, but it does give New Yorkers a chance to see international stars who don’t come to town very often. This year’s gala was, in fact, the New York debut of the Bolshoi Ballet’s Ivan Vasiliev, the Berlin State Opera Ballet’s Polina Semionova, the Hong Kong Ballet’s Jin Yao and Huang Zhen, and the Tokyo Ballet’s Mizuka Ueno.

The Youth America galas cap a multiday competition in which students win scholarships to ballet schools around the world. At the gala, they get the chance to share the stage with the pros. The audience, too, is filled with students, who at every year’s gala squeal ceaselessly from the top gallery of City Center.

The adult half of the program began with Roberto Bolle and the National Ballet of Canada’s Greta Hodgkinson in a duet from Jiri Kylian’s “Petit Mort.” Mr. Bolle is a paradoxical performer. On the one hand, he likes to put his husky physique on display: In almost any gala in which he appears, he will dance something in briefs.

On the other, there can seem something emotionally recessive about him, an abashment that can tempt him by way of compensation into overbaked emoting, as we sometimes saw when he guest starred with American Ballet Theatre last spring. Mr. Kylian’s duet was Mr. Bolle’s briefs number. He and Ms. Hodginkson stopped-and-started through a succession of love play poses and turned-in, turned-out dialectics.

Later in the program, Mr. Bolle returned to partner Ms. Semionova in the pas de deux from Roland Petit’s “Carmen.” This seemed like an odd choice for Ms. Semionova’s debut here. Perhaps she was playing it safe, because this piece isn’t a technical challenge, or perhaps she felt this piece would stand out amidst the inevitable fireworks. She didn’t really seem like the shoulder-wiggling, femme fatale spitfire type, though, and performed with almost understated decorum. There was no question, however, that she brought to the stage a perfectly tuned and beautiful physique and technique. She certainly made one want to see her in the context of a full repertory. Mr. Bolle didn’t exactly smolder, but he was tender and supportive.

Dancing opposite the Bolshoi’s Natalia Osipova, Mr. Vasiliev earned the largest standing ovation of the evening, for their spectacular performance of the familiar pas de deux from “The Flames of Paris,” an evening-long French Revolution opus choreographed by Vasily Vainonen during the Stalin years.

More than any other country, Russia now seems the culprit behind the current wave of eager young balletic tricksters, whose kamikaze performance manner affords thrills galore, some of them cheap. It’s a wave inspired in part by the performance manner of our dancers in the West. But Russians are nothing if not extremists, and there almost seems to be an extremely capitalistic planned obsolescence now involved: A young dancer’s career, particularly a man’s, seems designed to start burning out after perhaps five good years. There was a lot of this kind of thing going on during the Kirov’s just-completed season, and it was manifest again during the performances of Ms. Osipova and Mr. Vasiliev.

She is a pint-size soubrette, and he is a pinto-built firebrand. Both are fantastically gyroscopic and airborne. And fortunately, a lot of the cheap flash one customarily sees in this kind of display was absent here. The two prodigies came, saw, were determined to conquer, and they did. Yet neither dancer abused his or her extension, and neither one’s youthful charm or enthusiasm seemed calcified or overly commodified. At this point in their careers, both dancers may be “types,” but they are superior examples of the types they exemplify.

New York City Ballet’s Wendy Whelan and Philip Neal admirably chose not to perform another warhorse exhibition piece; instead, they danced the pas de deux from Balanchine’s “Chaconne.” The tape they danced to forced them into some freneticism, but both were intricately detailed ambassadors of ballet vocabulary at its most expansively creative.

Nicole Loizides and Steven Marshall of Momix performed one of Moses Pendleton’s most ingenious concoctions, “Millennium Skiva,” in which they wore silver stretch suits and skis, and positioned themselves to suggest that they were each racing downhill. American Ballet Theatre’s Sarawanee Tanatanit and Blaine Hoven did a duet choreographed by ABT’s Marcelo Gomes that seemed like a jungle floor show number. Drew Jacoby and Rubinald Pronk from Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company slam danced “Alloy,” a very William Forsythian piece choreographed for the occasion by Adam Hougland.

In the pas de trois from “Le Corsaire,” Jose Manuel Carreno regained his old form, which was missing in his ABT season last fall. David Hallberg gave us his unique take on male virtuosity. As their ballerina, Ms. Ueno confirmed the impression made earlier in the evening by Ms. Yao and Mr. Zhen in their performance of Victor Gsovsky’s “Grand Pas Classique.” Ballet is coming of age in Asia, shedding its slightly mechanistic air and becoming more fluid and organic. All three dancers were polite, precise, and stylish.