It's easy to think of Mahler in terms of giant weather fronts - swirling emotional currents before which listeners can only bend their heads. It's the kind of music you'd think choreographers would be mad to tackle, facing the serious risk of ending up disoriented or dwarfed.
But, as Rambert's programme underlines, Mahler's song cycles have a natural affinity with dance. Their powerful folk memories, narrative drive and strange silences actively invite choreographers to tell their own stories. In 1937, Antony Tudor set a benchmark for the best way to accept that invitation when he created Dark Elegies to the Kindertotenlieder.
Rambert's current dancers have been schooled to pitch their performances adroitly between abstraction and emotion, and if some of the men's dancing looks underpowered, Ana Lujan Sanchez and Fabrice Serafino are outstanding for the savage glitter of pain they bring to the work.
Kim Brandstrup achieves a parallel kind of triumph in his new setting of Songs of a Wayfarer. In pure choreographic terms, the dancing in which the protagonist (Thomasin Gulgec) tries to win back the woman he loves ( Lujan Sanchez) is superbly musical. Brandstrup's articulation of Mahler's restless dynamics and the range of his invention across solo and group dances has never looked better.
When Peter Darrell made Five Ruckert Songs in 1978, his portrait of a woman cutting her ties with worldly pleasure apparently made an equivalent emotional impact. What is striking today is the stylistic and dramatic debt the piece owes to Martha Graham. Despite a fine performance by Angela Towler, the work's rhetoric looks slightly tired and slightly fake. Edinburgh has however had mezzo soprano Jane Irwin defying the Playhouse acoustic to sing the Ruckert Songs. And with baritone Gerald Finley singing Elegies and Wayfarer, this programme adds up to a huge argument for Mahler as an inspiration to dance.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 0870 606 3424.
