“Contemporary Quartet,” New York City Ballet’s latest repertory program, included four works that gained stature by being brought together: Each provided so sharp a contrast to the others.

Christopher Wheeldon’s “Carousel (A Dance)” isn’t “Carousel” (the musical) put on pointe, but it is performed to a suite of songs from the musical. The trouble is that the ballet is just enough like the Rodgers and Hammerstein original to seem superficial by comparison. A tremulous young girl dances with a man who has been around, and the man’s dressed somewhat like Billy Bigelow is in the musical.

During the duet between the principals, danced on Friday by Tiler Peck and Damian Woetzel, “If I Loved You” is played faster than one usually hears this plaintive song delivered. In his choreography, Mr. Wheeldon doesn’t respond to the melodic sentiment that remains so powerful even when given an upbeat gloss, but simply has the dancers do the same things they’ve been doing adjusted to the orchestra’s speed. Ms. Peck’s flirtatious run off stage and Mr. Woetzel’s goat-like spring into the wings after her kept it all very lighthearted.

Eliot Feld’s “Intermezzo No.1,” first performed in 1969 by his own company, entered NYCB’s repertory last spring as part of an all-Feld program during the Diamond Project festival. Performed to Brahms’s piano works, it’s choreographed for three couples, danced on Friday by Megan Fairchild and Robert Fairchild, Jenifer Ringer and Charles Askegard, and Sterling Hyltin and Tyler Angle. Mr. Feld distinguishes his work from other examples of the piano ballet genre — which was so popular at the time — by continuously alternating ensemble and duet sections. The earlier dances in “Intermezzo” stick to finding balletic vocabulary to match the Romantic piano music, but as the piece evolves the tenor changes, venturing into sometimes jocular personality studies. Mr. Askegard gets carried away by some impulsive effusion and blows a kiss as he exits with Ms. Ringer; in her solo, she begins to move in silence, and then cups her hand to “listen” just as the music begins.

After an intermission, Jorma Elo’s turbo-charged “Slice to Sharp,” which also was created for last year’s Diamond Project, wiped the slate clean of the languors of “Intermezzo.” To infernally rapid Baroque violin strumming, Mr. Elo puts the dancers in positions where, as with the work of William Forsythe, some muscles bunch and some muscles correspondingly pucker: Sinews seem as raw as exposed bricks. Mr. Elo’s gestural lexicon is derived from street dance squiggles, and sometimes it’s the entire body squiggling, as the dancers ricochet against the space or the same dancer’s limbs seem to ricochet against each other.

Ashley Bouder made her debut in the role danced first by Ana Sophia Scheller. Ms. Bouder likes to knock them out of the ballpark, and here she didn’t have to hold back.

Maria Kowroski is now dancing a different and stronger role than she did at the premiere, allowing her the chance to slither effectively in a rubber-limbed solo. Teresa Reichlen made her debut in what had been Ms. Kowroski’s original place but somehow I wasn’t sure why she was there; the role remains weak.

Friday night’s performance closed with Peter Martins’s “Friandises,” in which Ms. Peck returned to dance opposite Daniel Ulbricht in the roles they created when the ballet was first shown a year ago. Here they are given difficult things to do but not temperamentally challenged: They assume their by now all-but-hallowed identities as pint-size dare devils.

But each is too young to have yet assumed hallowed personae. More successful are Mr. Martins’s passages for the ensemble; there are two slow movements, one for six couples, one for three, performed to a drowsy rustle supplied by Christopher Rouse’s commissioned score, and it’s here that you feel that this ballet really does have something to say. The finale is also exhilarating, as one watches the entire 20-member cast turns into whizzing projectiles.

On Saturday afternoon there was a repeat of the program titled “Balanchine and Robbins: Masters at Work,” which brought us the revival Jerome Robbins’s “Dybbuk.” It was again absorbing as a reminder of the way he could, even late in his career, shed at least temporarily what was his own virtual dybbuk, his submersion in the Balanchine doctrine. Opening the program was Balanchine’s “Serenade,” in which Sara Mearns made her debut as the so-called Dark Angel. At first Ms. Mearns’s attack seemed too sluggish, as if she was moving through molasses, but she has her own way of doing things and soon was commanding respect, for she is someone who really dances, rather than simply executing steps.

Also at the matinee, Ms. Kowroski made an intelligent and intelligible debut in Balanchine’s “Stravinsky Violin Concerto,” dancing the role created by Karin von Aroldingen in 1972. In the rhythmically insistent “Toccata” and “Capriccio” movements that frame the ballet, it was enjoyable to watch Ms. Kowroski’s footwork as she skipped or pranced or scuffled with precise intent. In her “Aria I” duet with Sébastien Marcovici, we might have been watching a version of spider and the fly or an acrobatic routine, as Ms. Kowroski handstands and backsprings her way across the stage. They are tunneling through over and around each other; sometimes she’s like a rope ladder tossed out into a fathomless limbo. Ms. Kowroski has what seems like a native feel for the absurd and antic and basked in some of the deadpan gaucheries of the ballet.