New York City Ballet’s Maria Kowroski put her back into “Firebird,” and gave one of her best performances on Wednesday night.

Tall and long-limbed, Ms. Kowroski maintained her control even in off-center promenades. She lashed her limbs heroically through her entrance solo, her quick passés striking like flapping wings. And she moved luxuriously through the adagio, in which Balanchine both mocks what used to be called “Orientalisms” and exploits them in his retooling of this mythological apparition. Restoring peace to the strife-torn landscape in the Berceuse, Ms. Kowroski’s arms surged out of her back, allowing her statuesque dominion over the stage, while her bourées were as shimmering as her jeweled headdress. Charles Askegard has the role of the dolt Prince Ivan down pat, and Dena Abergel was able to put some languor and romance into her scene with Ivan, despite the rapid clip of the orchestra’s tempo.

“Firebird” was the closing ballet in NYCB’s “For the Fun of It” program, which opened with Jerome Robbins’s 1972 “Circus Polka,” a brief party piece named for its Stravinsky score. Balanchine first choreographed the piece for Barnum and Bailey. Here ringmaster Robert la Fosse cracked the whip in the big tent, summoning relay after relay of young ballet students. Then came Balanchine’s 1980 “Walpurgnisnacht Ballet” to the familiar interlude by Gounod. Kyra Nichols managed to make the caprices and teasing accents of the role her own, and, in the soloist role, Abi Stafford was easy, accurate, buoyant.

Peter Martins’s 1992 “Jeu de Cartes” is performed to another Stravinsky score to which Balanchine originally choreographed. The work received fine performances by Sterling Hyltin — here a twiggy coquine — and Jared Angle, who was somewhat underpowered, but nevertheless displayed his fine quality. The brash and brightly technical Benjamin Millepied and Andrew Veyette, who slouched and soft-shoed through his eccentric paces, rounded out the cast.

NYCB’s “Visionary Voices” program opened on Tuesday night with Christopher Wheeldon’s “Klavier,” performed to the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” piano sonata. The movement is marked “Adagio Sostenuto,” and it lives up to its name. Its mighty chords, notes, and phrases reverberate with echoes that are difficult for the body to reproduce. Mr. Wheeldon compromises with curvy lines that seem glib and more prosaic than the music with which they are paired.

The 10-member cast was led by two couples: Albert Evans and Miranda Weese, and Wendy Whelan and Sébastien Maracovici. The entire cast moved raptly through the piece, with Ms. Weese producing some marvelously bacchic leaps. “Russian Seasons” was created last year by Alexei Ratmansky, artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. In the score, composed by Leonid Desyatnikov, the sections for mezzo-soprano are somber, whereas the mood is frolicsome when the solo violin predominates. The ballet can be seen as a postmodern take on Robbins’s “Dances at Gathering,” but it’s also indebted to Nijinska’s “Les Noces,” which Robbins also eventually choreographed.

Among the 12-member cast, Rebecca Krohn assumed the role created for Sofiane Sylve, giving an unrestrained performance that was perhaps her best to date. Wendy Whelan reprised her role as the disaffected maiden who drifts onstage, Ophelia-like, in floral chaplet and wedding gown, irrevocably consigned to a barren purgatory.

Concluding the program was Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments,” as visionary as it was when first danced in 1946 to a magnificent piece of music by Paul Hindemith, commissioned by Balanchine. The music and the ballet are ostensibly meant to exemplify the varying “humors” of the body that the medieval mind believed governed the human sensibility.

Tuesday’s revival had a haphazard feel. There were many debuts, beginning with the two couples dancing the first two “Themes” that open the ballet; they began the ballet on a shaky note. The performance started to gain a foothold, however, when Seth Orza entered to dance the third Theme, introducing a note of security that transferred to his partner, Megan LeCrone, whose performance was another debut.

Tom Gold, substituting for the originally scheduled Mr. Marcovici, gave a workmanlike performance as “Melancholic” that was more thoroughly realized in mental conception than in physical manifestation. And Savannah Lowery made her debut as the ballerina of the “Sanguinic” variation. Ms. Lowery was only in her second year as a corps de ballet member when the company cast her in the “pin-up” soloist role in “Rubies” in 2004. Since then, she hasn’t done too much solo work and is still finding her feet, but she is always compelling. Mr. Askegard had some trouble wrapping his legs around the perplexing steps of his solo, but he attacked them honestly.

In the “Choleric” variation, Teresa Reichlin was a properly volatile goddess, able to plant roots onstage when needed. But perhaps the best thing in the performance was Ask la Cour, who conveyed majestic assertion and contrarian indolence in equal measure in the “Phlegmatic” variation.