Christopher Wheeldon is New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer, as well as a very popular freelance choreographer for companies around the world. Perhaps he is overextended at the moment.

There is a sense of expediency to “Klavier,” his latest work for NYCB, which received its world premiere Tuesday night. The piece is performed to the slow movement – marked Adagio sostenuto – of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Piano Sonata.

Mr. Wheeldon’s admiration for Beethoven’s composition is apparent in the way his work treads lightly on the hallowed notes, which were well-played Tuesday by Cameron Grant, perched on a side wing of the stage apron.To the opening chords, the cast simply pivots one by one to face the audience.As the ballet proceeds, the movement is soft-contoured with scooping, rippling arms and bodies sinking into collapsible positions.

Mr. Wheeldon is interested in contrasting multiples of two and three dancers. But although there are only 10 members in the cast, the ballet is overpopulated. Indeed, its 20-minute length doesn’t allow most of the cast members to come into focus. Nor is the ballet really an ensemble piece in which the presence of community is the dominant protagonist, although early in the work the entire cast sinks to the ground en masse, as if listening for mysterious soundings of past or future.

Mr. Wheeldon casts his ballet with long-term interpreters of his work, and “Klavier” would look slighter than it is were it not for the cast’s superb dancing. The work is most concerned with the romantic vicissitudes of its lead couple, danced Tuesday night by Wendy Whelan and Sebastien Marcovici. Ms. Whelan projected her extraordinary mantis-like limbs into equally extraordinary shapes and lines.

A supporting couple is not given enough to do, but Miranda Weese and Albert Evans effectively conveyed a velvety nighttime enchantment in the roles. In addition, there are six demi-soloists: Pauline Golbin, Melissa Barak,Tyler Angle, Craig Hall, Sean Suozzi, and Andrew Veyette. A virtue of Mr. Wheeldon’s work is giving these young dancers a showcase; each one of them seemed unusual and interesting.The entire cast treated the piece with heartening solemnity, although perhaps a bit less reverence might have made it seem less overstriving.

The piece’s production values go a long way, perhaps too far, toward determining its character. “Klavier” suffers from being dressed in a manner that is too clever for its own good and too rich for the music’s blood. Jean-Marc Puissant has designed a set consisting of ropes slung from on high precariously down to the stage. His idea seems derived from Jerome Robbins’s 1951 “The Cage,” where a similar matrix signified a web of sorts housing a lethal breed of insect. A once-buoyantly suspended chandelier founders on the ground.

The mise-en-scene of “Klavier” thus situates it somewhere between Balanchine’s “La Valse” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”Indeed,there is a continuum between haunted Romantic ballrooms and Hollywood disaster blockbusters, since both describe pleasure grounds assailed by disaster.

Holly Hynes receives program credit for her “supervision” of the costumes for “Klavier.” The women wear leotards fashioned like Renaissance bodices under floor-length skirts in a transparent material; the men wear dark pants and transparent tops that match the women’s skirts, onto which is appliqued the suggestion of bandoliers. The clothes might be sweet at someone’s dinner party, but they seemed precious and self-conscious next to Beethoven’s severe composition.

In 1973, Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen made a piece, “Adagio Hammerklavier,” to this same music. Mr. Wheeldon engagingly acknowledges Mr. van Manen’s treatment of the score with several slight references to profile elements in Mr. van Manen’s vocabulary.

But the Sturm und Drang of Mr. Wheeldon’s duets for Ms.Whelan and Mr. Marcovici might be better suited to Chopin’s full-blown Romanticism. Indeed, “Klavier” at times reminded me of the way Robbins found in Chopin’s nocturnes fitting accompaniment to the domestic drama of three couples in his 1973 “In the Night.”

The beauty of the repertory system around which ballet companies are organized is that they permit repeated viewings of a work. Perhaps “Klavier” will seem more substantial with increased familiarity.

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