After decades of neglect at home and abroad, the Argentine art form of tango returned to the world stage in full force in the mid-1980s with the hugely successful show “Tango Argentino.” The show subsequently spawned a seemingly inexhaustible stream of tango performances, most of which can roughly be divided into two types: the tangospectacle, conceived for international audiences, usually as a touring show, and the tango concert, usually a local event, with local musicians, meant to showcase the interests and style of a particular composer or bandleader. Two recent programs, Pablo Aslan’s “Tango!” and Estampas Porteñas’ “Tango Fire” clearly illustrated these contrasting approaches.

Mr. Aslan’s show on Saturday was a low-key affair, with the focus placed squarely on the music. Mr. Aslan, who was born in Argentina but has lived in New York for the past 25 years, is a double-bassist; his interests lie in finding ways to combine the sounds and approaches of tango and jazz. The first, obvious change was in the instrumentation. A classic tango quartet might have a piano, double-bass, violin, and, most importantly, a bandoneón (a button-accordion with a metallic, plaintive sound). Mr. Aslan, in his group Avantango, has done away with the bandoneón and replaced it with the somewhat odd combination of trumpet, trombone, and sax, as well as a drummer.

These replacements added little, and did not make up for what was lost: none of the instruments could produce the clarity and plaintive tone of the bandoneón, the trumpet seemed out of place, and the mix of sounds was overly brassy and overpowered the piano.

And what about the dancers? Not all the numbers included dancing, but in those that did, two couples alternated: Sandor and Parissa (only their first names appeared in the program), and Francisco Forquera and Natalia Hills. Sandor, born in Argentina, was in the original cast of “Forever Tango”; Parissa, of Persian descent, is his partner in the touring show he has created,”Tango Vivo!” Sandor is a domineering partner with lightning-quick feet and flashy moves, who seemed to direct Parissa’s every turn and step with the pressure of his taut fingers on her back. Their numbers were tightly choreographed, with theatrical flourishes — he straddles a chair, she walks away in disgust, she returns, straddles him on the chair — and showy combinations. At one point he lifted her, spread-eagled, above his head and turned her, at high speed, many times over. Parissa smiled. One almost felt like holding up a score card.

Mr. Foquera and Ms. Hills, on the other hand, were more evenly matched, and far more in tune with the music — her little taps with the tip of her shoe, or piques, before the beginning of a phrase were perfectly timed and authoritatively executed. Mr. Forquera moved smoothly — a cat came to mind — and led his partner with a lighter touch. Even their stance — her forehead cupped perfectly against his cheek, beneath his right eye — evoked the perfect understanding that seemed to exist between them.

And “Tango Fire”? Well to begin with, the Sunday show was over in a flash. The company performed 28 numbers in roughly the time it took Mr. Aslan’s group to do 20. Partly for this reason, all the songs tended to blur into one. It was all very fast, very energetic, very percussive, and a bit too loud; the nuances in tempo, mood, and style were lost.

This is not to say that the musicians — a traditional ensemble in this case — played badly; the pianist, Gabriel Clenar, and bandoneónist, Hugo Satorre, especially, were masters of their instruments, and played with conviction and enthusiasm. But they seemed young and lacking in style, and the arrangements and selected tempi gave them too little room for shadings or interpretation. This, in fact, was the problem with the show as a whole: Like the musicians, the five dancing couples were young — much younger than Mr. Aslan and his crew — well-trained, fast, and, when the choreography called for it, virtuosic, but in general they lacked poise and distinction. It was difficult to discern a hint of individual style, or at times even to tell the couples apart.

The program was divided into two sections, the first meant to evoke a dance party at a café dansant or in the parlour of a brothel, and the second conceived as a more frankly expository “show.” Except for the flashier clothes and increasingly difficult lifts, however, the two parts did not differ much in tone. It is a testament to the skill of the dancers that a few details did stand out from the blur of leg extensions and ganchos — the tango’s characteristic hooking move. There was Mariela Maldonado’s little hint of the Charleston in “Milonga de mis Amores,”and later, a dance “duel” between two of the boys in “El Firulete” which included a lightningfast culebrita — a chain of tiny eight-figures across the floor — performed with the two men grasping each other’s elbows. In the second section there was a crescendo of eye-catching combinations — at one point, Luciano Capparelli lifted Rocío de los Santos to his shoulder, from where she dove, head first, toward the floor; he caught her just before she hit the ground. The crowd was pleased.

Because neither show truly captured the poetry of the music — one because it wandered too far from its source, the other because it took it for granted — each was, in its own way, disappointing. Both featured singers not quite up to the task of capturing the delicacy of the melodies, though Mr. Aslan’s singer, Sofia Koutsovitis, displayed a good deal of wit and style. But at times, while watching Mr. Forquera and Ms. Hills, it was possible to glimpse the poetry of the dance, the quality that led the Argentine writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada to comment that “[the tango’s] merit, like that of marriage, lies in the everyday, in the ordinary, without drama.”