The all-Tchaikovsky program performed by New York City Ballet — “Three Masters: Tschaikovsky. Balanchine. Robbins.” — is built around a revival of Jerome Robbins’s “Piano Pieces.” It was created for the 1981 Tchaikovsky Festival, and I saw it when it was first performed. Then, as now, it seems distinctly like second-tier Robbins work.

Renewed acquaintance with the piece makes it seem more than ever like something motivated by expediency, by the need back then to include a new Robbins in the Festival.

“Piano Pieces” continued the series of works that Robbins began with “Dances at a Gathering” in 1969, employing Russian and Middle European piano romanticism.

Robbins here uses an assortment of highly-Slavic Tchaikovsky piano works and responds with folkdance-shaded vocabulary and the suggestion of rustic community.

Artists inevitably recycle, revisit, and rework the same themes, but nothing in the steps, the imagery, or the rhetoric of “Piano Pieces,” is particularly fresh. Craft and professionalism, however, rear their heads.

When the work made its premiere, the lead male virtuoso role was created by Ib Andersen, who had just arrived at NYCB from the Royal Danish Ballet. Watching “Piano Pieces” on Thursday night, I recalled how at the time the role seemed to trivialize Mr. Andersen. Yes, he could easily be impish and elfin — but in other ballets he was much more.

Robbins has made him the pivot of the ballet, structuring the music to include recurring selections that almost dictate the man’s antics. He leaps and turns, sometimes dancing alone and sometimes with a small entourage of girls. He’s rather neutral sexually, but he’s very cheerful and energetically propelled by some other kind of adrenaline. The role seems at times like a village counterpart to the Jester in “Swan Lake,” or a he might be a jockey of some kind. This role alone puts the ballet dangerously close to kitsch, although the rest of the piece is on a higher level.

The ballet opens with the capering of seven men and women, who dance together in same-sex relays, or pair off in couples. Their arms are folded in front of their chest à la Russe, or they prance or slap their knees harvest festival style. Finally, they turn serious in a typical Robbins tableau that also includes a suggestion of playacting and self-dramatization.

Featured in “Piano Pieces” are three lead couples, who might be differentiated as “Spring” — Jared Angle and Jennie Somogyi, “Younger than Springtime” — Abi Stafford and Amar Ramasar, and “Late Summer” — Jenifer Ringer and Ask la Cour.

Mr. Angle’s and Ms. Somogyi’s duet is a kind of dialogue in which she makes a move and then he responds. They’re not totally together: They separate and scatter. Kneeling, he offers his hand to her; she accepts it. There are pauses, arrested glances. Ms. Stafford and Mr. Ramasar, by contrast, are moving constantly, peppy, beaming, and flirtatious. While Ms. Ringer and Mr. La Cour provide the mature note in Robbins’s customarily schematic organization of different phases in the state of relationships. Ms. Ringer’s solo has changes of tempo and mood. The cast of “Piano Pieces” did all that could be done with the material, although Joaquin De Luz as the jester/jockey, tirelessly agile as he was, nevertheless let off some hints that the banality of the role was getting to him.

The evening opened with Balanchine’s “Mozartiana,” and closed with his “Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.2,” both of which were more enjoyable than “Piano Pieces.” They are better ballets, and they were exhilaratingly danced; in “Mozartiana,” by Wendy Whelan, Philip Neal and Daniel Ulbricht, “Piano Concerto” by Sofiane Sylve, Jonathan Stafford, and Teresa Reichlen. The four demi-soloist positions in the “Mozartiana” Menuet also deserve particular mention: Dena Abergel, Saskia Beskow, Savannah Lowery, and Gwyneth Muller. Musically the entire evening was a treat; conductor Faycal Karoui and the NYCB orchestra, pianists Susan Walters for the Robbins and Cameron Grant for “Piano Concerto,” all urged the dancers on.