Rejoice at the Royal Ballet’s superb feast of Balanchine

Any evening devoted to the multifaceted genius of George Balanchine is something to be grateful for, manna in the wilderness indeed, but the Royal Ballet’s current offering left me hungry for more. Three works were on the programme, all created in the early stage of the great man’s career, two of them widely familiar, none of them reflective of anything he created post-war for New York City Ballet. Are his executors reluctant to licence productions of later masterpieces such as Agon or Stravinsky Violin Concerto, or is the Royal Ballet fighting shy of their stylistic challenges?

Gripe over, and let’s just rejoice in a feast of superb choreography at Covent Garden, performed with much excellence by dancers coached by Balanchine’s apostle Patricia Neary. And it says a lot for the strengths of Kevin O’Hare’s benign directorship of the Royal Ballet that despite the last-minute injury of four of his biggest stars, he could still rustle up two completely different casts of equal merit (and have some more to spare).

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Serenade is a moonlit nocturne populated by a melancholy sisterhood in spectral white, a homage to Fokine’s Les Sylphides in which men exist only to support and admire. It is both transparently simple, posing no great technical demands, and elusively subtle, rich in unexplained imagery and emotional resonances that are never clarified, sensitively responsive to the mood changes in Tchaikovsky’s suite as well as odd things chanced upon in rehearsal. Lauren Cuthbertson, magical in everything this season, shone as the piece’s tragic heroine, dancing with a freely musical amplitude and generosity that transcended all the rules and bar lines.