Officially, the main attraction of the Royal Ballet's triple bill is Jiri Kylian's Sinfonietta, which the company are dancing for the first time this season. Unofficially, the big event is Frederick Ashton's Scenes de Ballet, returning to the stage after an inexplicable absence of 10 years.
The effect of Ashton's 1948 ballet is like an exquisitely cunning, but magnificently powerful, jack-in-the-box. It is a tiny piece (22 minutes long) but, within the tight choreography, the dancers find vast poetic spaces to illuminate and occupy.
The two principals, Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg, could not be better cast. Both dance with the kind of technical aplomb that makes airy work of the choreography's geometric puzzles, and both possess a stylistic intelligence that allows them to head for the wit, gravitas and romance at the ballet's heart. As Kobborg beats almost visible sparks with his feet, his arms curving in a slow-burning gesture of greeting, and Cojocaru skims the stage into a reckless vaulting lift, the ballet's contrasts between gaiety and grandeur, heroism and intimacy, look as if they were created yesterday.
If Scenes finds its deepest truths through glamour and artifice, Sinfonietta (choreographed in 1978) wears its heart on its sleeve. Like the accompanying Janacek score, the ballet celebrates the human spirit, and its most stirring passages cruise high on the music's jubilant fanfares and play happily among its pastoral melodies.
The other work in the programme is a revival of Winter Dreams, Kenneth MacMillan's 1995 version of Chekhov's Three Sisters. This 50-minute ballet cries out for a sympathetic edit as too much of it falls wide of the emotional mark. But there are many moments of dramatic imagery: for instance, Kulygin (played by Anthony Dowell) turning furtive and blundering with the knowledge of his cuckolding, and Masha (Darcey Bussell) trapped by the impossibility of ever loving her husband again.
· In rep until January 28. Box office: 020-7304 4000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
