A crafty old coot is Paul Taylor. At City Center on Tuesday night, Mr. Taylor, 75, unveiled the New York premiere of “Spring Rounds,” a piece he created last year for the San Francisco Ballet. In his latest work, Mr. Taylor re-affirmed his mastery, plying old and constant elements in his work with some freshness and winking conspiratorially at the audience without undermining the tenor of heartfelt ardency professed in the work.

Customarily, Mr. Taylor’s works can be categorized either as a dark or light piece, but his sensibility is not always so clear-cut. Dressed in vernal attire by Santo Loquasto, the dancers gather onstage for “Spring Rounds,” their effusions and embraces suggesting camaraderie magnanimous to the point of excess. Knowing Mr. Taylor’s sly wit and askance view of human nature, we wait for the worm in the apple to appear. It never really does – the ballet proceeds, limning teeming marketplace or fairground or pastoral retreat. But an interesting tension is introduced that goes along with the music, Richard Strauss’s “Divertimento,” a comment on Couperin. The layers of irony in the music – its fractured baroque – establish a context of ambivalence right from the start.

The role Mr. Taylor choreographed for Lisa Viola suggested a solitary figure, a loner, detached from the frolicsome proceedings. Much of the time Ms. Viola danced alone; her solo choreography included instantaneous vertical-to-horizontal transitions that she executed with rock steady aplomb.

“Spring Rounds” offered a chance to study anew the nuances of Mr. Taylor’s signature language: his variant on the balletic bourree that becomes more of a shuffle, the way dancers put a foot decisively, rhythmically down to the ground, the way a man supports a woman in an off-kilter balance. Mr. Taylor’s spatial acuity made it engrossing the way one member from each brace of dancers positioned in opposite corners of the stage moved diagonally to stage center to dance as a couple.

The self-propelling perpetuum mobile embodied by the geometric circle added timelessness to “Spring Rounds,” as the ensemble skipped and waltzed around the stage in an enormous menage. Mr. Taylor mines the continuity of the circle for emotional ballast.

Next on the program was Mr. Taylor’s 1982 “Lost, Found and Lost,” returning after a long absence. The work is a precis of Mr. Taylor’s thoughts on the shifting parameters of homogenous group behavior and the relativity of the socially anomalous. Dressed in Alex Katz’s black stretch pants and jerseys topped with jeweled net headdresses – a paean to incongruity that is priceless – the dancers similarly demonstrated absurdist disconnection as they performed alongside a suite of pop music chestnuts bloviated with Muzak soupiness. When the music became younger than springtime, the dancers went into seizures. At other times they were rag-doll figures, limp enough for a clothesline. There were other sections in the work in which the dancers didn’t cover space kinetically, but instead wrapped the audience’s attention around themselves in the most unyielding of stationary stances.

In “Lost, Found and Lost,” the jokes were funnier for their abstruseness. A queue was arranged at the back of stage, but it wasn’t clear what the dancers were waiting for. Nevertheless, the universe of blase, impatient, and self-absorbed stances were amusing as they paraded before the audience.

Tuesday night’s opening concluded with Mr. Taylor’s “Mercuric Tidings.” Created to extrapolated movements from two Schubert symphonies, the company looked rather hysterical in the piece when they first performed it in 1982. Mr. Taylor put his dancers through the paces of steps that skimmed as weightlessly as balletic footwork, but given that these were steps the dancers were not really trained to execute organically, and given, too, that the Taylor dancers have customarily exhibited somewhat ungainly physiques in the balletic context, the outcome seemed like a compromise or even a send-up. But Mr. Taylor was attempting a new synthesis – fleet with heft.

The business of the work’s choreography remains for me fussy at times: In the speedy opening and closing movements, virtually every musical note cues a step, a weight shift, a hurled arm. I don’t think I’ll ever consider “Mercuric Tidings” one of Mr. Taylor’s most persuasive works, but today’s company performed it better than its original cast.

I must say that I visit the Paul Taylor Company today with some disappointment. While the current roster may be as strong as ever, the company’s circumstances are noticeably reduced. In recent years, its New York season has shrunk to two weeks performed with taped music, a far cry from the company’s glorious zenith: twenty years ago, its season at City Center was four weeks and performed to live music. Last year marked the beginning of a season now expanded to three weeks, but last night’s gala opening will be the only performance danced to live music. How has it happened that Taylor seems to be spending the late years of his career in a needlessly inhospitable habitat?

Until March 19 (130 W. 56th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-581-1212).