In her decade at its helm, Tamara Rojo transformed the English National Ballet from a touring troupe relegated to the shadows of its better endowed neighbor, the Royal Ballet, to a company with a bold identity of its own. As the new San Francisco Ballet director, the Spaniard is making some of the same smart moves—commissioning works by women, giving classics a contemporary spin. For “British Icons,” though, Rojo looks backward, to ballets she has known intimately, as a ballerina, but that West Coasters may never have seen. Sir Frederick Ashton made Marguerite and Armand in 1963 as a send-off for Nureyev and Fonteyn; it still reads as a pièce d’occasion. But Kenneth MacMillan’s geometric, allegorical 1965 Song of the Earth, to the mercurial life-and-death-embracing Mahler score, is a substantial work. —Apollinaire Scherr