It’s trite but true: Some things just get better with time. And the third iteration of ‘SCD + Piazzolla’ — Sarasota Contemporary Dance’s collaboration with harpist Ann Hobson Pilot, featuring the tango music of Astor Piazzolla — bore that out in more ways than one.

For starters, take Pilot, now an octogenarian, who retired as principal harpist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2009 and who rarely, if ever, performs in public these days. SCD founder Leymis Bolanos Wilmott — who originally created this collaboration in 2017 and brought it back for a run abbreviated by Covid in 2020 — convinced Pilot to return to the stage one more time. And oh, how lucky we are that she did. Pilot could as well have been plucking my heartstrings as the harp strings; her opening solo, “Chiquilin de Bachin,” a musical meditation played front and center stage, was a enough to bring you to tears.

Then there was Bolanos Wilmott herself, who also made a very rare return to the stage in “Oblivion,” a powerful, less-is-more solo that featured a shower of rose petals falling from her fingertips and the ceiling. Dressed in a flowing, floor-length scarlet dress, she moved between the musicians playing on stage — Pilot on harp, Marcus Ratzenboeck on violin and Rodolfo Zanetti on bandoneon — with languidly lovely arms and a lyrical, understated power that only comes with a certain life-experience maturity.

The choreography, too, seems to have ripened with time and repetition. Though the five dancers who performed it — Sarah Affainie, Makayla Lane, Jordan Leonard, Samantha Miller and Amber Osipov — are some of the newest to the company, they embraced both its quietest and most bombastic with skill and nuance. This third time around, even the trademark “prop” elements Bolanos Wilmott has used in the past — sweeping, open-fronted trenchcoats; balloons, both limp and inflated; and square tables which serve as both pedestals for dancing and blocks for stacking — seemed more essential and effective than ever.

And oh, that music! Though Astor Panteleon Piazzolla, an Argentine composer, bandoneon player and arranger, has been gone since 1971, his “nuevo tango”— a combination of traditional tango and elements of classical and jazz music — seems fresher and more soul-stirring each time you hear it. Played here live by Rantzenboeck and Zanetti with Pilot and Michael Maganuco taking turns on the harp, it evoked the magical, seductive atmosphere of a tango milonga, an Argentine social dance party.

In front of a closed curtain, sitting on a chair with his bandoneon on his lap and his knees opening and closing to manipulate the instrument, Zanetti performed a solo, “Adios Nonino,” giving the audience a close look at the challenges of playing an instrument little known in North America. The bandoneon is a box-shaped instrument that is played by opening and closing central bellows (like an accordion) while pushing buttons on both ends to produce haunting, melancholic sounds. Zanetti demonstrated well why it is referred to as “the instrument that cries.” (You might too.)

The music was the kind that makes you want to close your eyes and tune out everything else, but please don’t because this is perhaps SCD’s most visually stunning program ever. The floating rose petals, the gleaming instruments, the dancers’ (uncredited) costumes — red two-pieces with an open-fronted skirt to start; varied white outfits missing a sleeve, or a pant leg after the intermission — and some indelible “picture moments” in the choreography were all enhanced by the subtle, but not-too-dark lighting by Celeste N. Silsby Mannerud.

In general, I appreciate the chance to re-view a dance I’ve seen before; there are always things you’ve missed the first or second time around or you’re in a different place yourself, which changes your response (One rare exception: I think I’ve seen enough Nutcrackers to last a lifetime.) But repeating an entire program runs the risk of turning away those whose response may be “Oh, I’ve seen that before.”

To assume that here would be a grave mistake. ‘SCD + Piazzolla’ may have marked a revisiting — of Pilot’s playing, of Bolanos Wilmott’s dancing and choreography, of Piazzolla’s music — but, like a fine wine, it seems to have only improved with time.

.”SCD + Piazzolla,” Cook Theater of the FSU Center for Performing Arts, 5555 N. Tamiami Trail. Additional performances through March 22. sarasotacontemporarydance.org