George Balanchine’s “Monumentum Pro Gesualdo” and “Movements for Piano and Orchestra,” two short chamber ballets he created in 1960 and 1963, respectively, have for decades been programmed back to back, both performed by the same lead couple. On Wednesday night these paired works formed an appropriate vehicle for Darci Kistler, partnered by Charles Askegard. Ms. Kistler again demonstrated a remarkable performing sensibility that continues to enchant despite the limitations of age.

The trajectory of Ms. Kistler’s career has to some degree paralleled that of American super-technician ballerinas like American Ballet Theatre’s Cynthia Gregory and NYCB’s Merrill Ashley. As their techniques became more undependable in their late 30s, they stopped concentrating so intently on the quantitative capacity of their legs and began to conceptualize the ways in which their entire bodies could register emotion and musical impulse.They also began finessing nuances of the arms, which can still be honed long after a ballerina’s legs begin to lose pliancy or strength.

Something of the same thing happened with Ms. Kistler, but much earlier in her career. After making an extraordinary NYCB debut as a teenager in 1980, she suffered a foot injury a couple years later that kept her off stage for two years. Ms. Kistler was never going to become an allegro technician on the order of Ms. Ashley or Ms. Gregory, yet she appeared destined to become a great ballerina in the brisk yet longlegged and lyrical tradition of Balanchine’s principal muses.

Since returning to the stage in 1985, Ms. Kistler has managed to fulfill much of her early potential despite long hiatuses offstage due to both injury and maternity leave.She became a mistress of exquisitely rendered details; of particular note was her glorious 1999 performance in Balanchine’s “Bugaku.” It was dream casting because the type of detailed inflections that her arms calibrate exactly parallel the modus operandi of Asian dance.

Ms. Kistler’s gorgeous legs still glow, but her movement is often rocky. Now 41, she can still sometimes pull a remarkable performance out of the bag: She was unforgettable in “Serenade” two years ago, managing to manifest an almost-bacchante like fervor.

In Wednesday’s pairing of “Monumentum” and “Movements,” Ms. Kistler found material that allowed her to show what she can still do.These two works accommodate her – “Monumentum” especially – because they contain short passages of movement punctuated by pauses and rests, they consist mostly of supported partnering, and the ballerina’s solo choreography material is performed largely in place, rather than in large, space-covering exertions. Both ballets are iconically spare – the cast is clad in black and white and there is no decor – yet they demonstrate starkly contrasting emotional barometers.

“Monumentum,” performed to Don Carlo Gesualdo’s Renaissance madrigals reorchestrated by Stravinsky, contains ravishing tableaus and ensemble patterns. Balanchine’s meditation upon the love fancies of Renaissance poetry provides a definite anecdotal and gestural color, more pronounced than in many of his ballets.

When the curtain rises, the male and female leads are facing each other, but he is looking downstage, evading her glance. A few seconds later, she is turning away from him coquettishly. At one point they are obviously searching, at another they are each listening. Even though much of Ms. Kistler’s technique is now devoted to conservation, she somehow musters a caution-to-thewinds impetuosity when appropriate, as when she was thrown in arabesque to the waiting arms of a knot of men.

Named for the Stravinsky work it accompanies, “Movements for Piano and Orchestra” turns a poker face to the romantic fancies entertained by “Monumentum Pro Gesualdo” and partakes of the disaffected mood of most of the pieces Balanchine made to atonal music works in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The ballerina and the six women who make up the ensemble seem engaged in a self-absorbed quest to test their motor responses by alternately flinging a leg, slowly extending it sensuously, or placing it down on the ground abruptly in a proprietary statement.

Supported by her partner, the ballerina splays her legs at the audience in a kind of howl of protest. There is a studied detachment in the relationship of the ballerina and the male lead and to both their relations to traditional theatrical illusionism. They perform a passage and then deliberately drop their balletic decorum and saunter to the back of the stage to wait for their next cue. Eccentric, grotesque elements contrast to the idealized Renaissance harmonies of “Monumentum.” The male lead approaches the ballerina in a lunge that resembles a fencing move, or sashays over to her in a sideways scuttle.They exchange kinetic dialogue that scans to a syncopated tap meter. Kneeling, their bodies clasped together, they provide each other a fleeting refuge.

Ms. Kistler, aided by the ever-game Mr. Askegard, proved that she can still illuminate the wit,the nihilism,and the astringency of “Movements.”

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On both Tuesday and Wednesday nights, the program opened with invigorating performances of Balanchine’s great “Concerto Barocco,” led by Yvonne Borree, Rachel Rutherford, and Albert Evans.The company has evidently been working diligently to reclaim this ballet from the indifferent renditions it has been guilty of so often in the last two decades.

City Ballet’s winter season runs until February 26 at the New York State Theater (Lincoln Center, 212-870-5570).