There are love knots galore in Christopher Wheeldon’s “Rococo Variations,” which had its world premiere at the New York City Ballet last week, but there is no Gordian knot of deep emotional involvement between the two couples who perform. The centerpiece of NYCB’s “Inspirations” program, “Rococo Variations” is performed to and named for Tchaikovsky’s composition for cello and chamber orchestra, “Variations on a Rococo Theme.” Mr. Wheeldon’s composition closely mirrors the curlicues of the music without becoming pedantic.

Performed at its premiere by Sterling Hyltin and Giovanni Villalobos, together with Sara Mearns and Adrian Danchig-Waring, “Rococo Variations” serves as a fitting final work for Mr. Wheeldon’s tenure as the company’s resident choreographer, displaying his talent and preference above all for clever and sometimes inventive solo and ensemble movement, as well as supported partnering.

Mr. Wheeldon chose to end this chapter of his career on an intimate note, giving the four dancers a chance to characterize themselves. Ms. Hyltin’s and Mr. Villalobos’s steps are marginally more flitting and lightweight, while Ms. Mearns’s and Mr. Danchig-Waring’s are marginally slower and more weighty.

Several times throughout the ballet, the two women crown Tchaikovsky’s theme by raising some Rococo architecture of their own, which the men sometimes thread in a variation on Balanchine’s “London-Bridge-is-Falling-Down” motifs. Sometimes, too, Mr. Wheeldon employs the Balanchinian habit of taking an Old World movement and giving it a double-time expression. “Rococo Variations” also contains characteristically Wheeldon imagery, as when the dancers put their ears to the ground or slide seamlessly but unexpectedly to the ground and then snap right back into the air again.

Finicky manners of the ancien regime are interspersed with contemporary and oxymoronic quirks. The two couples overlap in interesting ways: At one point, Ms. Hyltin and Mr. Villalobos exit stage right, while Ms. Mearns and Mr. Danchig-Waring inch downstage, he with his back to us. Sometimes Mr. Wheeldon envelops all four dances into a single silhouette, as when they move downstage, alternating in counterpoint between chaine turns with an effacé attitude pose. The musical interplay between solo cadenza and tutti statement, between theme and multiple variations, makes Tchaikovsky’s score consistently surprising and vital, and Mr. Wheeldon’s quartet keeps pace with the musical vitality.

On Saturday, NYCB opened its “American Songs and Dances” program. It began with Peter Martins’s “Thou Swell,” performed to Richard Rodgers songs, sung, at times during the piece, by two onstage performers. The scenery by Robin Wagner gives us cutaways of nightclub terrace tables, from which the dancer-patrons descend to take turns on the floor. The women wear pointe shoes, but the taproot of the vocabulary is ballroom dance. Beginning and ending with “Where or When,” the Rodgers tunes are skillfully arranged by Glen Kelly and orchestrated by Don Sebesky. The four lead couples on Saturday night were Yvonne Borree and Nilas Martins, Darci Kistler and Jared Angle, Faye Arthurs and Charles Askegard, and Ms. Mearns and Tyler Angle. Ms. Borree was more relaxed than she often is in more stringently classical works, and Mr. Angle showed himself an excellent partner for Ms. Kistler, as he had earlier in the season in Mr. Martins’s “Valse Triste.” “Thou Swell,” thou art harmless.

In Jerome Robbins’s 1995 “West Side Story Suite,” which closed the program, Robbins uses some of the original choreography for the 1957 musical, tweaking and adding new material. But what fit to perfection on the Broadway-size stage and sensibility looks a little lost on the stage of the New York State Theater, especially since, at some crucial junctures, Robbins seems to have stayed too closely within the confines of the original Broadway ensemble configurations.

“West Side Story Suite” is an oddity indeed. The NYCB dancers, with their relatively delicate musculature, look anomalous amid the urban jungle context. There is novelty value in hearing ballet dancers sing and speak curt bytes of dialogue, which is something they’re not often called upon to do. At Saturday night’s performance, everyone on-stage tried diligently to be something other than they mostly are for the balance of the NYCB performance week.

In between these two Broadway-catalog ballets there was on Saturday night Robbins’s “Ives, Songs.” Here the unique idiom of the American art song as exemplified by the utterly singular imagination of Charles Ives. Created by Robbins in 1988, a decade before his death, the ballet was to some extent a look back at his own formative years. When the curtain rises, we see three young girls, who are costumed by Florence Klotz in a manner nearly identical to the way Jo Mielziner dressed similar characters in Antony Tudor’s “Pillar of Fire,” which was created for American Ballet Theater in 1942. A mature gentleman, played by Robert La Fosse on Saturday, strolls among the dancers and thus establishes the past tense of what is happening, something Tudor was also fond of establishing. Robbins’s choreography picks up the songs’ textual references to populate the stage with children, young people, and mature adults, evoking life cycles. Duets for the two adult couples — here, Wendy Whelan and Mr. Askegard, and Ms. Mearns and Jared Angle — crown the ballet and bring it to a satisfying close. At these and other moments, Robbins’s choreography is, in its own way, able to evoke the drowsy, small-town dusk as memorably as did Tudor’s.