On the one hand, Alexei Ratmansky restores ballet masterpieces like only an artist and advocate could, with loving attention to a world of lost details. On the other hand, he makes contemporary ballets. Sometimes the one hand takes the other, fingers interlaced, as in his upcoming premiere for the New York City Ballet. The Russian-Ukrainian will set his wise, assiduous reconstruction of the Grand Pas from Petipa’s Paquita beside Balanchine’s 1951 Minkus Pas de Trois, which was conjured from the full-length Paquita of his salad days, just before the Russian Revolution. The Ratmansky-Petipa Grand Pas turns out to be many small pas buzzing around the lower leg, with bold, shapey arms making up the difference. For the trio, Balanchine transfers that lower-leg aureole to twittering arrow-straight jumps and capacious shifts from one leg to the other. He draws our attention to up and down, here and away. From classical to neoclassical, from charmingly French and full of character types to achingly Russian and spiritually vast—the evolution of ballet before our eyes. Bracketing the Ratmansky-Petipa-Balanchine concoction on the “Innovators and Icons” program are Jerome Robbins’ In the Night—a Chopin moon to Dances at a Gathering’s Chopin sun—and Balanchine’s strange, perky Symphony in Three Movements, to the Stravinsky. —Apollinaire Scherr