The New York City Ballet polity carried Friday night’s performance, which featured the world premiere of “Friandises,” a new ballet by the company’s artistic director, Peter Martins. In each of the three works on offer, NYCB’s ensemble was placed in the foreground, demonstrating how the corps de ballet functions as the true “body” of a ballet company.

“Friandises” is named, in traditional NYCB fashion, for its score, which was co-commissioned by NYCB and the Juilliard Dance Ensemble. (On February 22, Juilliard will unveil an entirely different work, by Adam Hougland, to the same music by Christopher Rouse.) “Friandises” refers in French to edible treats, and the score serves up one glancing musical allusion after another.

The curtain rises to the accompaniment of swarming noises and scrambled Renaissance meters that suggest Stravinsky’s “Agon” and “Symphony in Three Movements,” and Mr. Martins quotes from Balanchine’s ballets to these scores. Big band and musical comedy also weigh in as the score proceeds, in addition to the splintered brass of such atonal masters as Webern.

The leads in “Friandises” are two attractive young dancers, Tiler Peck and Daniel Ulbricht. For the most part, Mr. Martins chooses to focus on their most obvious and readily accessible abilities.

Ms. Peck has just turned 17. She is short but well-proportioned and has strong technique. Whenever she is onstage, she beams with an enthusiasm that doesn’t seem over-sold – and, one hopes, won’t become so. Ms. Peck already has accrued Broadway and Hollywood credits, and she reminds me a bit of Bambi Linn and Joan McCracken, two of Agnes de Mille’s favored interpreters of the 1940s.

Throughout the evening, Ms. Peck tore into all the material she was given, including a series of hip-wrenching battements in the opening movement that conveyed the impression she was brutalizing herself. More organic were her dizzying turns in the finale, frenetic but undeniably exciting. Mr. Ulbricht also got brutal at times in a misguided attempt to give himself greater size in his aerial saut de basques, but the ferocious high winds generated by these choreographic passages didn’t allow much room for finesse.

Mr. Martins has given more varied material to the nine couples of the ensemble. The best parts of Friday’s performance of “Friandises,” in fact, were two slow ensemble sections whose departure point might have been Balanchine’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin.”

Although Mr. Martins’s choreographic lexicon is thoroughly grounded in Balanchine’s vocabulary – he has also, I think, studied William Forsythe’s work – Mr. Martins does have his own vision and aesthetic. It is frequently a chilly one, but tenderness is not entirely absent. Earlier this season, when Mr. Martins’s 1986 “Songs of the Auvergne” was revived, Darci Kistler and Philip Neal’s first duet was obviously meant to suggest the great romantic encounter of their lives.

In “Friandises,” the partnered slow sections also demonstrate tenderness and provide an aggregate of riches, since each couple was compelling enough that Mr. Martins could easily have focused the section entirely on him and her. It was refreshing to see him instead steer the ballet decisively toward a communal ethos.

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The evening began with Balanchine’s “Divertimento From ‘Le Baiser de la fee.'” Carrie Lee Riggins and Amanda Edge were fleet and scintillating, marshaling a 10-member ensemble of women. They danced their hearts out, effectively making up for the ragged around the edges performances of the two leads, Megan Fairchild and Joaquin De Luz.

The company closed the evening with Balanchine’s “Union Jack,” choreographed in 1976 for the American bicentennial. It is an homage to the United Kingdom’s processional and theatrical rites. Virtually the entire company gathers onstage to troop the colors.

Wendy Whelan, leading the MacDonald of Sleet regiment, again demonstrated her versatility, pummeling through a wild battery of jumps like an untamed mare charging through the barn doors. During the ballet’s middle section, Jenifer Ringer and Nilas Martins capered expertly as a pair of sodden music-hall entertainers donning the ceremonial garb of the Pearly Queen and King of Cockneyland. “Union Jack” concluded jubilantly with a series of hornpipe romps.

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