Yes, it’s cold outside. It’s dark. You could just stay at home with a streaming service — I get that, I really do — but there is another option: New York City Ballet’s winter season is like a rare tonic that Gwyneth Paltrow would sell on Goop if she could.

There’s something almost dismaying, in a wonderful way, about being a part of the audience experiencing City Ballet’s melding of music and dance at this time of year. It fills a void.

The season, which opened Tuesday at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, began with two lovely, concise programs by George Balanchine, who created the company with Lincoln Kirstein and whose ballets rarely cease to astonish even though he’s no longer around. On Wednesday — what would have been his 116th birthday — there was a special charge in the air for a laudable triple bill starting with the sparkling “Allegro Brillante,” set to Tchaikovsky. Balanchine once said, it “contains everything I know about the classical ballet — in 13 minutes.”