The Kirov Ballet of St. Petersburg looked like a completely different company in George Balanchine’s dazzling evening-length Jewels, which ended the Russians’ two-week Lincoln Center Festival appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House. They were the same dancers who’d done the 19th-century heavyweights Swan Lake, La Bayadère, and Don Quixote earlier in the run, but dancing this choreography, in the city where it was born, seemed to transform them.

Critical opinion frowns on New York City Ballet right now as having lost its Balanchine touch while trying to refashion itself without him. The Russians may not look like the Balanchine dancers of 35 years ago, but they don’t market the hard-edge sexiness of Peter Martins’s NYCB either. What was so moving about the performance of Jewels I saw Saturday night was the stretch the Kirov made from Petipa to Petipa’s modern descendant. It was like watching ballet history jump the centuries.

Jewels was created in 1967 for a New York City Ballet riding to the crest of its greatest success. It had moved into its grand new home at Lincoln Center, the New York State Theater, and was enjoying long seasons, big subscription audiences, and generous public funding. Balanchine made an evening of ballets that showed off the facets of classical ballet in three different modes and styles while confirming the terrific dancer resources at the company’s disposal. The slightly rococo French romanticism of Emeralds (led by Violette Verdy and Mimi Paul) was followed by the rough-and-tumble vaudevillean Americana of Rubies (Patricia McBride, Edward Villella, and Patricia Neary) and the imperial but tragic Russian expansiveness of Diamonds (Suzanne Farrell and Jacques d’Amboise).

The Kirov might never supplant the scars left on our hearts by those originals, but in stepping into this choreography of Balanchine’s, its members seemed to be learning a different way to dance. You could almost see them discovering an eagerness to grab the music, an appetite for space beyond their reach, and a pleasure at being cogs in a wonderful group machine. The ballerinas, especially Zhanna Ayupova in Emeralds, filled out the musical phrase instead of insisting on dragged-out tempos to make an impression. The male partners found they had to turn and jump instead of just being good leaning posts and porteurs. The corps members seemed to live in the music rather than waiting for it to move them.

I saw Emeralds through some tears, partly because of Ayupova’s musicality, but mostly because of Balanchine’s affecting journey through Gabriel Fauré’s theater music (Shylock and Pelléas et Mélisande). This is a ballet with all the usual forces and situations tumbled out differently from what was expected: an almost whimsical first couple; a somber, almost ritualistic second couple; a trio for a man and two women who leap joyously in tandem; and a corps de ballet that vanishes after the first section and comes back only at the end.

One misstep the Kirov made, or the Balanchine delegates who coached it (Karin von Aroldingen, Sara Leland, Elyse Borne, and Sean Lavery), was to omit the coda that Balanchine added in 1976. In an extended leavetaking, all seven solo dancers have brief encounters with one another and the women exit, leaving the three men pensively looking after them. These second thoughts may have been Balanchine anticipating his own death, but they also pulled the ballet back from the conventional, celebratory finale to a more serious conclusion that had been anticipated by a disquieting horn phrase during the initial festivities.

Rubies, set to Stravinsky’s Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, opens with the male and female ensemble standing rock-steady on their toes in a semi-circle, clasping upraised hands. Then it splatters into a succession of shameless tricks and diversions from American popular stages: struts, shimmies and cakewalking, jokes, chases, and a pas de deux of deliberate feints and grabs.

The dancers didn’t quite capture the colloquial attitude of these carryings-on. The ballerina, Irina Golub, grinned all the time, unnecessarily, but her partner, Viacheslav Samodurov, made witty monster steps in the background and caught her nonchalantly when she suddenly let herself topple backward. Daria Pavlenko played the Amazonian third woman I sometimes think of as Balanchine’s update on Sleeping Beauty’s Lilac Fairy.

I thought Sofia Gumerova and Danila Korsuntsev were splendid in Diamonds (the last four movements of Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony), which could be one of many riffs Balanchine made on Swan Lake. The relationship was clearer than ever because I’d seen the Kirov’s Swan Lake the same afternoon. You wouldn’t want to discard one for the other, but Balanchine’s economy, his capturing, even honoring, of high Imperial ballet’s emotional and theatrical core without its pomposity, seems to me miraculous.