In front of a packed house at Northrop on Sunday, Twyla Tharp Dance launched its Diamond Jubilee, a coast-to-coast tour of the celebrated choreographer. For the performance, the dance company performed two expansive works set to live music that highlighted the choreographer’s intensive interest in pattern, repetition and structure.

Opening the show was a revival of Tharp’s “Diabelli” (1998), set to Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations,” performed live by pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev. The Diabelli of the title refers to Anton Diabelli, a well-known composer in Beethoven’s time. He had written a waltz theme and sent it to all the top composers, with a plan to publish their variations and donate the proceeds to widows and orphans of the Napoleonic wars. Instead of composing just one variation, Beethoven composed 33.

Beethoven’s composition breaks down Diabelli’s waltz into its structural make-up, then expands on those building blocks. Similarly, Tharp strips waltz dancing and other partner and social dances into their bare elements, using those pieces to construct an austere and dizzyingly complex composition.

Tharp’s sleek pattern-making was divinely realized by an ensemble of 10 dancers. When dancing all together, they moved in pristine synchronicity. When broken off into separate groups, they wove in and through each other like a precise machine, fluidly creating complicated shapes, lifts and poses.

After intermission, TTD performed the world premiere of “SlackTide,”accompanied by Third Coast Percussion performing their bespoke arrangement of Philip Glass’ “Águas da Amazônia,” composed in 1993 for a Brazilian dance company. Drawing on South American rhythms and evoking the fecund ecosystem of the rainforest, the music created a sense of place.

The group has been playing “Águas da Amazônia” for about a decade, and has made a new version for the Tharp collaboration with unusual instrumentation like chromatically tuned PVC pipes, and a marimba made of red oak planks. Woven together with synthesized sounds, flute playing by Constance Volk and an angelic glass marimba, the tones were so unique, it was a pity you couldn’t see the instruments.

The dancers brought the audience with them to the banks of the Amazon. Moving in slow motion — as if through water at first, they soon appeared to balance on rocks at the river’s edge.

Loose hips and bent knees made up a jiggling, liquid style. To the playful back and forth of marimba and flute, the dancers at times channeled creatures of the Amazon— frogs, perhaps, or a flying insect buzzing around the water’s surface.

As in “Diabelli,” Tharp brought moments of playfulness, such as dancers leapfrogging over each other. Tharp also inserted moments of surprise, like a long, perfectly frozen pause, or a short section that seemed to nod to the art of flamenco.

You might not normally think of Beethoven as being similar to Glass. Experiencing both composers’ works set to dance by Tharp offered a frame to think of these two composers together. Like Tharp herself, they deconstruct forms and re-assemble them, displaying their mastery in the process.