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The Royal Ballet has rifled through its archives and the results are wonderful to see: three exceptional works made by three 20th-century greats marked by three impressive debuts. There’s a flamboyant heritage piece, poignant melodrama and whirlwind neo-classicism, all with a distinctly Russian bite, performed by a company at the very top of its game.
The evening begins with Mikhail Fokine’s The Firebird, a strange, hypnotic work created by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1910 to peerless Stravinsky. Natalia Goncharova’s vibrant 1926 folkloric designs – currently the focus of a major Tate Modern exhibition – set the scene; amid a jewel-coloured moonlit orchard, we catch a flash of scarlet feathers and the Firebird appears.
It’s Yasmine Naghdi’s first time in the role but you wouldn’t know it, commanding the audience as she does with intense dark eyes and spiky port de bras. Edward Watson is a charismatic Tsarevich, Gary Avis, unrecognisable under heavy make-up and long witchy fingers, a colourfully villainous Koschei.
A whipfast costume change and Avis is back (minus the prosthetic nose) for A Month in the Country, Frederick Ashton’s 1976 take on Turgenev’s play about a wealthy household shaken from its stupor by the arrival of a handsome tutor.
Marianela Nuñez, always the sunniest of dancers, here tries her hand at the multi-layered Natalia Petrovna, the bored, self-obsessed housewife who tries to seize happiness – only to bring misery to herself and her ward (Francesca Hayward on luminous form). Nuñez captures Ashton’s expressive upper body work along with his intricate tight steps and sharp changes of direction – her final scene, hunched over a chair in despair, is tear-inducing.
For the evening’s finale it’s over to Mr B and his joyously tricky Symphony in C, created in 1947 and set to sparkling Bizet. Fumi Kaneko, bringing her debut forward to replace Natalia Osipova, is coolly precise alongside Vadim Muntagirov in the opening movement, followed by a composed Sarah Lamb in the second. A very special night.
Until June 16, Royal Opera House (020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk)
