Style was substance on Tuesday night, when New York City Ballet performed George Balanchine’s 1960 “Liebeslieder Walzer.”

This suite of vocalized Brahms waltzes – here performed live by a quartet standing to the side of the stage – takes place in a private ballroom where the performers often watch their fellow guests dance, when not dancing themselves. The piece is meant to suggest an at-home entertainment hosted by members of the haute bourgeoisie rather than royalty, but it’s always better to elevate the etiquette than to dumb it down. When I caught one of the men leaning against the wall during a 1999 performance, the credibility of the entire performance dropped several notches.

On Tuesday night, by contrast, the cast – Darci Kistler and Charles Askegard, Kyra Nichols and Nikolaj Hubbe, Miranda Weese and Tyler Angle, and Wendy Whelan and Nilas Martins – sat on straight-backed chairs with regally erect posture. Each dancer displayed an attentiveness toward the others that was gracious rather than prying.

The members of the original “Liebeslieder” cast, as well as ballerinas like Suzanne Farrell and Patricia McBride, who performed it at NYCB well into the 1980s, were versed in an earlier tradition of narrative ballet, and made “Liebeslieder” as emotionally resonant as they could. But as with virtually every ballet, many interpretations are possible: Every dancer is unique, and nothing can be repeated in performance art.

Tuesday’s dancers were more emotionally restrained, concentrating instead on style and deportment. They danced well, and their performance made sense. Although “Liebeslieder” becomes more feverish as it progresses, it never turns into Antony Tudor’s “Lilac Garden,”where etiquette falls away and unconstrained personal disclosure runs wild. Indeed, for all Brahms’s Romantic agitation, Balanchine was an arch-modernist, and at times this ballet curtly undermines sentiment.

For example, after a duet by Ms.Whelan and Mr. Martins, in which Ms. Whelan repeatedly subsides to the floor in ardent surrender, the music changes to something light-hearted. Rather than bring on another pair, Balanchine has this romantically fraught couple remain onstage. Launching into a carefree gambol, they come close to wiping clean their previous melodrama.

Brahms’s waltzes are by turns fast and slow, grave and skittish. Balanchine matches him with an equal deter mination to forestall whatever monotony the music’s structure might impose. From the opening measures of the ballet’s first half, in which the women wear dancing slippers with heels, Balanchine takes us to a fantastic realm by making sure that what they perform doesn’t bear much resemblance to an actual waltz – waltz vocabulary here is the least inhibiting of frameworks. Balanchine cannot help but use innumerable balances – ballet’s waltz-time sway – but he gives the balance a variety of accents and shadings. He paces the ballet with unexpected continuities and appearances,and includes the occasional trio and quartet to balance the many duets. He occasionally intro duces anecdotal color in the form of whispers between the couples. And in the second half, when the ballerinas go on pointe, the entire mood becomes more uninhibited and subjective.

Ms. Kistler and Ms. Nichols, the two senior members of Tuesday night’s cast, seemed a little hard-pressed at times. But as can happen in ballet, the slight struggle they evinced made me all the more impressed by the effort they expended. Ironically, Ms.Nichols made her role a little more girlish than she has in the past. She performed with sagacity the many variations on the erotic chase her role provides, emphasizing moments of hesitation and then capitulation.

Mr. Angle, who was scheduled to make his debut in the ballet later this week, replaced Sebastien Marcovici on Tuesday night and gave an exceptional performance. Mr. Angle’s moonstruck Endymion made a case for the inclusion in “Liebeslieder” of young performers. Ardent as he was, he maintained his dignity at all times.

Balanchine’s “Brahms-Schonberg Quartet,” also a long ballet, was a surprisingly appropriate pendant to “Liebeslieder” this evening. Schonberg added acid to Brahms’s harmonies and tonalities, and Balanchine followed suit. The orchestration here is grandiose, and the ballet seems to evoke a palatial ballroom rather than a more intimate space in a lavish private home.

Carrie Lee Riggins, who took on the demi-soloist role in the Andante, displayed new confidence that was nevertheless appropriately decorous. Also outstanding was Jenifer Ringer in the swooning lead of the Intermezzo, the movement in which the 1966 “Brahms-Schonberg” most seems like a sequel to “Liebeslieder.”

Until June 25 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).