New York City Ballet’s season opening gala Tuesday night was billed as a tribute to NYCB co-founder Lincoln Kirstein, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year. But the opening and closing sections seemed as much a tribute to George Balanchine himself.

The gala was called to order with the Garland Waltz and Rose Adagio from “Sleeping Beauty,” in which Balanchine danced as a child at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Balanchine created his own Garland Waltz in 1981 for NYCB, and Kirstein was instrumental in NYCB’s staging its own version of the full ballet a decade later. On Tuesday, the dancers of the corps de ballet were joined by children from the School of American Ballet, another institution founded jointly by Balanchine and Kirstein. Dancers of all ages performed zestfully and rhythmically, and Megan Fairchild as Aurora made me sorry I’d missed her debut in this role earlier this year. Ms. Fairchild marshaled and subsumed her arabesque, her pirouettes, and her extension, into a persuasive evocation of adolescent character and aristocratic style. The finesse of her transitions, her port de bras, and her poses lent her performance a real air of cultivation. Just as reverberant with Balanchine’s history and heritage were the two closing works, both choreographed by Peter Martins, NYCB’s artistic director, and performed to music by Mikhail Glinka, 19th-century father of Russian opera. Mr. Martins’s “Grazioso,” which received its world premiere Tuesday night, used a mélange of Glinka excerpts, including the Mazurka from his opera “A Life for the Tsar,” which Balanchine staged for NYCB in 1950 — and danced in at its first performance. Mr. Martins also used selections from the ballet interlude in Glinka’s opera “Ruslan and Ludmilla,” which was rechoreographed by Mikhail Fokine for the Mariinsky Theatre in 1917.

At times, “Grazioso” seemed to salute Balanchine’s 1955 bravura “Pas de Trois,” set to the same music. Danced by Ashley Bouder, Gonzalo Garcia, Daniel Ulbricht, and Andrew Veyette, “Grazioso” is crammed with fast and difficult steps, so much so that the quartet was able to get through it only at the expense of a significant amount of turnedin legs, foreshortened musculature, concave torsos, and vague definition.

After “Grazioso” came Mr. Martins’s Polonaise from “A Life for the Tsar,” which was also performed at the opening of NYCB’s Balanchine Celebration in 1993. Wheels within wheels of dancers flooded the stage with what looked like a cast of thousands, including all of NYCB and more students from SAB.

In between these two Russian episodes, there were works by Jerome Robbins, Christopher Wheeldon, and Balanchine. I find Robbins’s “N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz” one of his thinnest and weakest works, but NYCB, evidently, does not: The ballet was performed in full at the company’s fall 2005 gala opening, then in part at the company’s fall 2006 gala opening. On Tuesday it re-appeared in a new cinematic incarnation, the brainchild of NYCB soloists Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi. Standing in front of the curtain, the two dancers explained that they saw the work as an “abstract twin” of Robbins’s choreography for “West Side Story,” and that they wanted to remove the ballet from its 1950s context by filming it in locales around New York using NYCB dancers dressed in contemporary clothes. The first installment, “Passage for Two,” filmed on the High Line, was danced onscreen by NYCB’s Rachel Rutherford and Craig Hall.

Next came Mr. Wheeldon’s watch-winding 2003 duet “Liturgy,” performed to Arvo Part’s string ostinatos and ticktocks. Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans echoed each other’s movements and engaged in artfully suspended partnering. Palms together, Ms. Whelan’s arms rippled in divination or devotion, combined with some neo-William Forsythian gestural movements. If not performed by a ballerina of Ms. Whelan’s authority, this duet might seem trite.

Rounding out the program was the fourth movement and finale from “Western Symphony,” in which Maria Kowroski danced the role created by Tanaquil Le Clercq. Le Clercq was filmed in this cowgirl cabaret exhibition just weeks before her paralysis from polio in 1956. Ms. Kowroski danced it at NYCB’s memorial tribute to Le Clercq in 2001. Ms. Kowroski was better Tuesday night than she had been in 2001. She danced with more comprehension, more freedom, and more security, as well as with a lighter touch. She didn’t quite make the dance her own, but she emerged from Le Clercq’s shadow more than most ballerinas have been able to. Opposite her on Tuesday night was Damian Woetzel, cavorting like an amiable billy goat. The two leads were not helped, however, by the orchestra, which played at much too stately a gait.