Jerome Robbins dominated the “Dance for Joy” program at New York City Ballet on Thursday evening.

As a valedictory work and Robbins’s last, “Brandenburg,” which opened the program, will not rank with “The Tempest” and “The Marble Faun.” Nevertheless, trying to decipher what was going on in the choreographer’s head when he made it in 1997 is just as interesting as what is going on onstage. Robbins was 18 months away from death when “Brandenburg” made its world premiere. But rather than reflecting on the state of youth or on his own youth per se, he revisited a choreographic ambit he had first mined in his “Interplay” in 1945. “Interplay” was made for a Broadway revue and contained a high infusion of balletic movement; “Brandenburg” belongs more totally to a realm of balletic neoclassicism, but its zeitgeist is nevertheless indebted to the same rather cloying and caricatured take on youth.

In “Brandenburg,” however, Robbins achieves an interesting kind of musical asymmetry, beginning the ballet with the complete Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, but then continuing with three excerpted movements from different Brandenburgs. In the opening Allegro, the sizeable ensemble bounced and hopped its way through phrases that often look crowded and stressful. The lead juveniles, here performed by Ashley Bouder and Gonzalo Garcia, danced impeccably and were no cuter than they were required to be. They continued with the slow duet, trafficking in various, disjointed emotional stances, somewhat in the manner of Paul Taylor, who had made his own “Brandenburg” in 1988 to the same music (and included in it some homages to NYCB). More ensemble work followed, threading demi-soloist couples, before the arrival of Maria Kowroski and Philip Neal, a taller and more mature couple. They danced very slow rings around each other. The last two movements attempt to tie up loose ends, integrate the varying personnel, recapitulate some themes, and throw in a few new ones for the strata. Complete integration doesn’t happen, however, and that helps to make the piece more enjoyable, falling short of excessive tidiness.

There’s nothing really wrong with “Brandenburg,” but while all choreographers recycle and rework their trademark themes, Robbins recycles some of his and other choreographers’ more trite movement motifs to an unnerving extent. Was “Brandenburg” a failure of nerve or simply of energy and invention? Either way, it fascinates as a Rorschach test of a highly conflicted creator, bringing Robbins’s career to a suitably irresolvable close.

His 1956 classic “The Concert” is an entirely different story, a series of absurdist charades in which boundaries are blurred, character relations appear and disappear at will, and the sure touch of a master is palpable at all times. Here Robbins blends the baggy-pants clowning of the Borscht Belt and the hairs-breadth timing of vaudeville with the droll acerbity of the New Yorker sensibility — the sets are by New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg — and the bait and switch of Surrealism. Maria Kowroski was perfection as a daffy bluestocking who swoons with delight at the Chopin music played onstage; she is deflated when another woman shows up wearing the same hat she purchased after long soul-searching, and in a surrealist touch is left following an anarchic bacchanal clutching a prosthetic hand, which she deposits gingerly inside the open piano.

Situated between the two Robbins works is Christopher Wheeldon’s “Carousel (A Dance),” which could be called the musical “Carousel” in suite form. The Richard Rodgers score is bloviated and the story whittled down to two lead dancers who are obviously meant to suggest Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow, danced Thursday by Tiler Peck and Damian Woetzel. Their duet generated a strange and near-morbid heat, taking these dance personages, and, to some extent, Mr. Wheeldon, into uncharted territory. In the final moments, the ensemble returns merrily, Ms. Peck exits coquettishly, and Mr. Woetzel stag-leaps after her. Throughout much of the work, “Carousel” doesn’t seem a product of the ballet stage, suggesting instead the operetta flavor of something that tried out at a pebble-beach resort town in Britain. But the two lead dancers were compelling.

Paired with “Carousel” was Peter Martins’s “Zakouski,” set to selections by four headline Russian composers and danced by Yvonne Borree and Nikolaj Hubbe, who seem to represent professional entertainers rather than inhabitants of a stage universe where everyone expresses themselves in dance. They might be doing a floor-show turn at a White Russian nightclub in Jazz Age Paris, but then “Zakouski” also ventures into the hallowed neoclassical vocabulary of the House of Balanchine. The piece is not without charm, and gives the dancers enough material to work with. Ms. Borree and Mr. Hubbe recognized the hybrid milieu they were meant to evoke and etched the steps meticulously and with integrity.