If you have been avoiding her for the last several years so as not to witness a great choreographer succumb to self-caricature, you may now safely return for Twyla Tharp’s jubilee program—or half of it, anyway. The hour-long Diabelli features Tharp doing what she does best—variations on variations—to Beethoven played live by the precocious pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev. The music’s structure lends the choreographer a game plan; its myriad forms let her play. Diabelli met with acclaim when it premiered in 1998 and only disappeared for lack of funds. As for the program’s other half, it’s a premiere, which has spelled trouble for Tharp lately. Plus, Third Coast Percussion seems to have run Philip Glass’s partially recycled score, the 1993 Águas da Amazônia, through a Moog synthesizer; the original, indigenous instruments’ aqueous luminosity dries up. But Tharp is 85. That she is still hitting the road—with an ever-new crop of dancers for a 21-city tour stretching into April, no less—may be reason enough to show up. —Apollinaire Scherr