When New York City Ballet last visited London, in 1983, the year their founding choreographic genius, George Balanchine, died, nobody could have imagined that a quarter of a century would pass before they returned. So, the star names of those days are gone; the NYCB that has just held an anticipated season at the Coliseum is a company of young dancers unfamiliar to Londoners. In the intervening years, we have become far more accustomed to the Russians on their regular visits.

So, were NYCB a revelation? No. The éclat of the first three (out of four) programmes has been uneven. They opened, rightly, with a Balanchine celebration, three of his masterpieces that should be a knockout bill – Serenade, Agon and Symphony in C. The comparisons they invite, however, are not so much with how NYCB danced them in the past, but with how many other companies (including our own Royal Ballet) have shown them to us in the interim.

The beautiful Serenade, to Tchaikovsky, the first ballet Balanchine made in America, is an all-time marvel. NYCB dance it more briskly than we are used to – speed and attack being their notable qualities – and this was their best success of the opening night; yet there was a nervy edge to the moonlit romanticism – a sense the company hadn’t fully “arrived”, and felt cramped on the Coliseum stage.

Agon, to Stravinsky’s score, is brilliantly modern and life-enhancing, even after 50 years. But the extraordinary pas de deux at the ballet’s heart, with its erotic intensity and amazing convolutions, fell surprisingly flat in the emotionally mismatched performance of Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans.

Symphony in C (Bizet) is a great closing ballet, with a massed corps. Yet it was the corps, far from together in what should be disciplined lines, that niggled. In sum, we have seen better performances of these ballets elsewhere.

The second programme was devoted, also deservedly, to NYCB’s other great style-moulder, Jerome Robbins, whose ballets are not so ubiquitous as Balanchine’s. This produced a more upbeat atmosphere. The Four Seasons, to Verdi’s jaunty ballet music from the opera I Vespri Siciliani, is a kind of masque (ruled by the god Janus), with witty and lyrical dances. Winter has shivering girls, suggestions of skating and a sparkling ballerina in Megan Fairchild. Spring brings lilting romance for Sara Mearns and Jared Angle, as well as giddy ebullience. Most exhilarating, though, is Fall, led by Ashley Bouder and with Daniel Ulbricht as a perky, virtuosic Faun.

Robbins was a choreographer of musical eclecticism, in ballet and on Broadway, but in Moves he created a piece in silence, achieving hypnotic effect in a series of formations, processions, groupings, confrontations – all kinds of moves, in fact. So inbuilt is rhythm that you never miss the music.

In The Concert, Robbins made one of the best comedy ballets, about an audience’s fantasies at a Chopin piano recital. Those seeing it for the first time are always in for a treat. NYCB’s performance, including the deliciously dippy Sterling Hyltin as the girl in the big blue hat, and Andrew Veyette as a henpecked husband got up as Groucho Marx, sent us home happy.

The mixed bill Four Voices brought more recent works made for NYCB by international choreographers, all new to London. Christopher Wheeldon opened with Carousel (A Dance): lively ensembles shaped after the titular roundabout, set to the waltz from Richard Rodgers’s musical. Zak-ouski (that is, hors d’oeuvre), by the company’s director, Peter Martins, uses music by four composers for a Russian-flavoured duet that – though Yvonne Borree and Veyette worked at its teasing mood – felt wan. From Mauro Bigonzetti came In Vento (music by Bruno Moretti), in which the intense, athletic Benjamin Millepied is an outsider figure – that much is clear. The piece has kinetic interest, but felt impenetrable. Alexei Ratmansky, the Bolshoi director, scored highest with Russian Seasons (music by Leonid Desyatnikov).

Colourful in its stylised peasant costuming and variety of patternings and images, it has themes of love, loss and death, and creates a sense of community, as in Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering. That comparison is no small commendation.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010