At New York City Ballet last week, the company chose four ballets to evoke “Balanchine’s World,” and each veered off the most familiar paths treaded by the choreographer. The program began with the truly atypical “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” which Balanchine made for NYCB’s Ravel Festival in 1975. The work is performed to orchestrations by Ravel of music that the composer had written originally for piano; it is atypical in the Balanchine canon, because it is performed by eight couples, with no interjection of soloists or even obvious leaders of any kind. It’s all ensemble, all the time, and its singularity is affirmed by the way that precise symmetries are preserved, even when they appear to have been arrived at accidentally.

“Balanchine’s World” could as easily be called “Balanchine’s Worlds,” as we took a trip to southern climes for his 1964 “Tarantella,” wherein he uses the staple of Neapolitan folk revelry and shoots it full of his own neoclassical vocabulary. Led last Thursday by Megan Fairchild and Daniel Ulbricht, “Tarantella” is loaded with signifiers of hopped-up hot-bloodedness that look more campy the faster they are performed. Since a tarantella is by nature fast and fiery, and since Balanchine’s most characteristic tempo is fast, his “Tarantella” can get campy indeed. But both Ms. Fairchild and Mr. Ulbricht whacked their tambourines with fearless gusto.

A complete contrast in mood and tempo is provided by 1963’s “Bugaku,” in which Balanchine takes stock of different cultures’ varying ideals of masculinity and femininity.

“Bugaku” welds the outward-flowing energy of ballet with the centripetal postures of Asian dance and theater. The heroine seems to be bride, courtesan, court entertainer, or all of the preceding. Maria Kowroski performed the role on Thursday. Ms. Kowroski never let her erotic acrobatics turn her into a dominatrix. Even at her most overtly connubial, she maintained a stately detachment, which lent complexity to her participation in this proclamation of male-female interdependence.

In “La Sonnambula,” which closed the program, everyone onstage is somehow tainted. For the ballet, created in 1946, Balanchine visited one of his recurring locales: the haunted ballroom. And he laid on the Gothic atmospherics in a more pointed manner than usual, setting them to a melange of Bellini themes expertly assembled by Vittorio Rieti.

Here a perverse and abusive Baron presides over a ball in which the hired entertainers are no more adept at role-playing than the attendees. Among them is an enigmatic Poet, who makes himself familiar with both the Baron’s mistress — the Coquette — and the Sleepwalker, a resident madwoman in the Baron’s castle attic.

The Poet is unquestionably a victim, but not exactly a martyr. He’s able to embody centuries of poetic marginalization. He could be descended from the bards described by Juvenal and Petronius as hungering for crumbs at the tables of patrons in the early days of the Roman Empire. But he is also one of the 19th century’s rogue adventurers, avid for experience with no compunction at letting the chips fall where they may.

The Sleepwalker is passive, but she still stokes her own agenda. In her duet with the Poet, she seems devoid of autonomy. On Thursday night, when Darci Kistler’s Sleepwalker danced backward in a bourrée, she seemed likely to ricochet off the rear wall of the theater had not Nikolaj Hübbe’s Poet stopped her and sent her spinning in a new direction. The Sleepwalker’s helplessness exists alongside hidden potency; when the Poet is dispatched by the Baron, it is the Sleepwalker who descends from her aerie and carries his corpse back upstairs with her.

The principal roles in “La Sonnambula” are so evasive that it’s difficult ever to feel that total justice has ever been done them, but the interpretations we saw Thursday were admirable. Though young, Amar Ramasar was at least as baronial as most of the Barons that NYCB has fielded in recent years. Ms. Kistler has danced the Sleepwalker for 20 years, and her experience informed her smoothly skimming bourrées and lent an alertness to her surface obliviousness. Making her debut as the capricious Coquette, Sara Mearns produced moments of authentic power. And Mr. Hübbe was fully cognizant of the ambivalence of the Poet and his fateful visit to this iniquitous estate of Balanchine’s imagining.