The season’s latest offering in New York City Ballet’s repertory programming was a “Tribute to Kirstein,” which commemorated the centennial of the birth of the company’s co-founder, Lincoln Kirstein, on Saturday night. It wasn’t entirely clear where the tribute came in, except that the company danced a piece called “Tribute,” choreographed by Christopher d’Amboise, who danced with the company during the 1980s and whose father, Jacques d’Amboise, was one of the company’s leading dancers for 30 years.

“Tribute” was first performed in 2005 at the annual workshop performances of the School of American Ballet. In that venue it was probably perfect. On the professional stage it has less to offer. It’s made for around a dozen dancers who go through the paces of solos, duets, trios, and quartets to a potpourri of Bach pieces. It’s not a facsimile of a Balanchine work, but is designed as an immersion into the Balanchine vocabulary. On the whole it doesn’t really take on a theatrical life or become anything beyond a lexicographic exercise, despite Mr. d’Amboise’s efforts to stitch together the individual segments in his work. But it was interesting to see Ashley Bouder in a more recessive role than the ones she usually dances.

The program opened with Balanchine’s 1959 “Episodes,” a project masterminded by Kirstein himself. Throughout his life Kirstein, penned many polemical put-downs of modern dance, but he became a steadfast admirer of Martha Graham. In 1959, he brokered a collaboration in which Graham and Balanchine produced works to pieces of music by serialist master Anton von Webern. The Graham work was quickly dropped by NYCB, but Balanchine’s “Episodes” has remained a staple of the repertory.

Balanchine renders Webern’s blips and drones and mewls much less forbidding with his theatrical acumen, which gives each piece of music a different kinetic and visual parallel. The first piece, “Symphony, Opus 21,” is danced by a couple — Abi Stafford and Edwaard Liang on Saturday — together with a small ensemble of men and women. As the music is uprooted from melody and harmony, so are the dancers from balletic syntax. In the following “Five Pieces, Opus 10,” the stage is, by comparison, occupied by only two dancers: Ask la Cour (his debut) and Teresa Reichlen. The dancers are initially isolated in pools of light, which intermittently converge, as do the dancers themselves.

The third piece, “Concerto, Opus 24,” was danced by Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans, accompanied by four women. And the final piece, Webern’s dilation upon the Ricercata in six voices from Bach’s “Musical Offering,” is more musically accessible, compared with the preceding works. Balanchine places a lead couple before an orchestral ensemble of women, and allows the ballerina a few curlicues, modeled here by rangy Maria Kowroski, partnered by Charles Askegard. There was never a dull moment in Saturday night’s “Episodes.”

Saturday night’s performance closed with Balanchine’s 1977 extravaganza, “Vienna Waltzes,” in which Sterling Hyltin made a frisky debut in the randy and raucous “Explosions Polka” of Johan Strauss, a dramatic contrast to her debuts earlier this month as Aurora and in a rather reflective solo in Robbins’s “2 & 3 Part Inventions.” In Richard Strauss’s “Erste Walzerfolge,” drawn from “Der Rosenkavlier,” Kyra Nichols was sovereign and bewitching in the role originally created for Suzanne Farrell. Although Ms. Farrell was only 31 when she first performed this role, it’s a particularly good showcase for a senior ballerina like Ms. Nichols. Saturday night, she let her head, arms, and back turn this into a soliloquy of life experience, as she enjoyed fleeting encounters with a man who may be a figment of her memory or imagination. From this intimate reverie, the ballerina leads the way into a grand finale of waltzing couples, a theatrical stroke for which we must thank both Balanchine and Kirstein, the man who brought him to America in 1934.