Mark Morris’s evening-length “Mozart Dances” returned Wednesday night to the New York State Theater, where it was first performed during last year’s Mostly Mozart Festival.

In “Mozart Dances,” Mr. Morris finds inspiration in the interplay between solo instruments and orchestral ensemble in concerto and sonata forms. They allow him a corresponding focus on one or two people, who became pivot points in the work, allowing us extended individual portraits that don’t get lost in the shuffle — something of a rarity in Mr. Morris’s full-company works.

The first two pieces manifest a distinct character by being largely single-gendered. The opening movement, “Eleven,” is danced almost entirely by the women of the Mark Morris Dance Group. The men make an appearance early on, and then don’t come back at all until the next piece in the trilogy. In “Eleven,” the solo piano in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 11 in F major is identified with the diminutive Lauren Grant, who wends and skitters her way through an ensemble of tall, strong, flamboyant women.

In his body of work, Mr. Morris frequently takes stock of his forebears in the evolution of modern dance, and the women of “Eleven” suggest the lineage of this idiom as it traces back to the maenads of Isadora Duncan. In “Eleven,” Mr. Morris reasserts the importance of the floor, and the dancer’s fall to the floor, which early modern dance posited as a surrender to gravity in a riposte to ballet’s defiance of it. Mr. Morris also flirts with the vocabulary and its development. Sometimes the women are on the floor, seemingly ready to initiate a Martha Graham-style rise into a contraction in which the hands and the entire body are cupped. Instead, they rise into a crumpled, Origami-like human topography.

Ms. Grant is as self-willed as the piano itself; she scopes out her own path and sometimes fakes herself out with feints or unexpected non-sequitors. Throughout “Eleven,” there are extremes of composed formality and studied, almost irreverent casualness. The women frequently stride nonchalantly on and offstage, dispensing with illusion as they revert to simply being “themselves.” At the same time, there’s a lot of quotation and commentary here on some of the most elegant balletic arabesques and poses. The ensemble may be anarchic, pursuing a multitude of individual trajectories, but then suddenly fall into a walk or march into lockstep. The contrasts in height between tiny Ms. Grant and the ensemble of Amazons, and in solo expression versus choral unanimity, all set up an ongoing dialectic that remains interesting to the end. It is frequently echoed by brief isolations in the ranks of the ensemble that complement Ms. Grant’s more consistently autonomous traversals. During the cadenza at the end of the opening Allegro, Ms. Grant is on the floor while the Amazons twist and thrash, striking a remarkable catalog of intricately sculpted stances.

The next piece in the “Mozart Dances” trilogy is “Double,” which this year follows a pause rather than an intermission. It provides a direct and graphic contrast to “Eleven,” because this piece is largely about the male ensemble. But here the men, dressed in Martin Pakledinaz’s breeches and shirts, looking like a tribe of Huck Finns, are depicted as boys rather than adults. In “Double,” the two piano soloists in Mozart’s Sonata in D Major are to a large degree visualized by Noah Vinson and Joe Bowie. Mr. Bowie isn’t dressed like the rest of the men, but instead is fashion-forward in a tailcoat and breeches over a bare chest. He’s a flamboyant figure of authority, sometimes directing rites of initiation or maturation. At times, he demonstrates and Mr. Vinson follows.

Sometimes in “Double,” the Morris men are a rather finicky and fussy gang, as they skitter and scamper, their nimble feet keeping pace with the nimble fingers on the keyboard. Sometimes their prelapsarian idyll is shadowed by internal and external pressures. There is some sense of erotic awakening or expectancy, something of the nascent homoeroticism of a Thomas Eakins swimming hole, which then finds a different and powerful consummation when the women make an appearance three-quarters of the way through.

“Mozart Dances” deflates a bit in the final piece, “Twenty-seven,” set to Mozart’s final piano concerto. Here, Mr. Morris reworks much of the movement material that he’s introduced in the first two works, but without establishing focus and throughline as well as he had earlier. “Twenty-seven” lacks the linchpin of one or two significant individuals. Bringing the sexes together throughout the movement never provides the synergy that it should, and the myriad musical repetitions of Mozart’s concluding Allegro finally defeat Mr. Morris. But “Eleven” and “Double” are among the very best of his recent work.

“Mozart Dances,” is musically and scenically distinguished. Emanuel Ax was piano soloist for the concertos that open and close the trilogy, and was joined by Yoko Nazaki for the Sonata. Louis Langrée conducted the Lincoln Center Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. British painter Howard Hodgkin’s Rorschachian black smudges form the scenic backdrops, constantly and imaginatively transformed by James F. Ingalls’s lighting.

Until August 18 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).