Paul Taylor Dance Company at David H. Koch Theater Paul Taylor Dance Company began its visit to the David H. Koch Theater on Tuesday with a program including "Brandenburgs." The Paul Taylor Dance Company season that opened at the David H. Koch Theater on Tuesday night is historic. Bringing this great troupe to Lincoln Center for its first season there, it shows how richly this company's dancing projects into the heights and depths of the multitier house: a marvel. If you're used to watching dance in the Koch Theater, then you can't help feeling that the three dimensions of its stage space come alive in unfamiliar ways; the very air onstage seems to have a new texture. Less happily, the troupe's first season at Lincoln Center will be completely accompanied by taped music. The New York musicians" union has denounced the company for performing without an orchestra; some of the union's members distributed leaflets on Tuesday night. Mr. Taylor's troupe, which used to have an orchestra for four-week seasons at City Center years ago, is now caught between devil and deep blue sea - between the live music it, like many dance companies, can no longer afford and the recordings that change both the acoustics and spontaneity of performance. All seats on Tuesday were priced at $3.50, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of "Aureole," a work that helped to change the history of modern dance. In 1962 $3.50 was the top price. Mr. Taylor had performed with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham. Then, in an act both rebellious and conservative, he took the barefoot modern-dance style he knew (largely that of Graham), and connected it to the rhythm and structure of mainstream concert-hall music (Handel), thereby releasing a lyrical momentum and rhythmic responsiveness in the style that had been forgotten. To some of his artistic colleagues this was a sellout, a decision to be popular rather than original; and they never forgave him. (They included John Cage, who had dedicated a piece of music to him, and Robert Rauschenberg, who had been his designer on several important occasions. Those chapters in Mr. Taylor's life closed.) But Mr. Taylor's decision released an outpouring of lyrical musicality in many modern-dance works of the last half-century: not just his own, but those by Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris and more. He has often worked against his music in one way or another; and some of his pieces either use unconventional scores or make no rhythmic connection to their accompaniment. "Aureole," however, initiated a new orthodoxy, which soon positioned Mr. Taylor at the center of American modern dance. Yet until Tuesday night the Taylor company hadn't performed it in years. Since Mr. Taylor is among the master choreographers of modern dance, I was looking forward to watching the revival as an important piece of Taylor history. "Oh, so that's how he was thinking then." He has choreographed successfully to many works of Baroque music since "Aureole"; thanks to them (not least his most beloved work, "Esplanade," which is set to five movements from Bach concertos) I was expecting to find it a period piece. Certainly "Aureole," as presented on Tuesday, resonates with history. You can still feel in it that the young Mr. Taylor here is addressing America's two then-dominant choreographers, Balanchine and Graham. Balanchine had choreographed a solo in "Episodes" (1959) for him and then had invited him to dance the title role in his "Apollo" (1928); Graham had featured Mr. Taylor as a leading member of her company for the past seven years. "Aureole" evokes the rough-hewn naïve classicism of some of the "Apollo" sequences for one man and three women; and it employs the dance phraseology of some Graham passages. But those are just incidental points of interest. This "Aureole" is a fresh young world of its own. A particular pleasure is the way its musicality, while irresistible, keeps taking you by surprise. Some phrases seem to move at half the music's speed, and some moments seem to dam the music's current altogether. There are many friendly oddities. Anybody seeing it for the first time can parody some of the striding steps, with arms swung in opposition, that get repeated (partly because those strides have gotten under your skin), but they're part and parcel of this work's innocent ebullience. Best of all are the texture and dynamics of the dancing. In the role Mr. Taylor made for himself, Michael Trusnovec - a great dancer now in the high summer of his talent - makes you feel the choreography's shapes, arcs, shifts of weight, phrases are newly made. The opening of his arms from a halo position, the luxuriant rigor with which his body hovered amid a simple transfer of weight from one foot to the other: these registered with powerful beauty throughout the big theater, every bit as wonderful as his most athletic and virtuoso flights. Perhaps more than any dancer alive, Mr. Trusnovec is an authoritative model of stylistic economy. Every movement he makes is ardently decisive, devoid of all excess or waste, pared down to the essence. Amy Young, Michelle Fleet, Francisco Graziano and Heather McGinley (a newcomer, strikingly redheaded and gifted) complete the cast. I particularly welcome the fullness of tone in their footwork. Mr. Taylor's style has always had a few ballet qualities, but his dancers have always leavened that with a rich weightedness that almost no ballet dancer can approach. Tuesday's performance showed me how much of that sense of weight occurs in the foot, using the floor with such lusciousness. No less excellent, and yet more abundant, is "Brandenburgs," a 1988 work set to movements from Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, again here featuring Mr. Trusnovec at its compelling center, with brilliant solo roles for Ms. Young, Eran Bugge, Laura Halzack and an extraordinarily vivid chorus of five men. The 2006 comedy "Troilus and Cressida (reduced) " has individual pratfalls that make me laugh out loud even though I lose patience with it over all; still, I adore the originality of the mind that conceives a cartoon-farce version of the Troilus-Cressida story (with three Cupids and three Greek invaders) and then fits it to the adorable corn of Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours." The audience loved, perhaps most of all, the closing work, "Piazzolla Caldera" (1997), with its men and women meeting like rival armies for the sexually charged world of the tango. I find the steaminess and yearning all too obvious, but never mind. This is a piece in which you can dissent while still acknowledging the skill of Mr. Taylor's stagecraft and the panache of his dancers. Eighteen other works join the repertory of the season that lies ahead; I look forward to them all. The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs through April 1 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; ptdc.org/nyc.