Over the next three years, Birmingham's arts organisations will perform the entire works of Igor Stravinsky, and as the opening salvo of this ambitious project Birmingham Royal Ballet are performing four pieces to his music. The first, by BRB soloist Michael Kopinski, is Dumbarton Oaks, which takes its inspiration from the flight of moths. This is a likeable, fluttery number culminating in a violet flash and a shower of sparks, suggesting that the protagonists meet their end in a giant Insect-o-cutor.
George Balanchine is surely smiling down on BRB's Duo Concertant. To fine playing by Robert Gibbs (violin) and Jonathan Higgins (piano), Robert Parker and Elisha Willis dance with compelling tenderness, capturing the piece's subtly changing moods with precision. With his open gaze and jazzy elegance, Parker personifies the New World nobility that Balanchine sought to define.
Willis, meanwhile, is starry, phosphorescent and fearless. At the heart of this work is a kind of sadness, a sense that all - even love - must fade, and a similar poignancy shades Frederick Ashton's Scènes de Ballet. With its shivery 1930s glamour, this is a risky piece to schedule immediately after Duo Concertant, especially with the same principal couple, but in the event, it works wonderfully. The golden duo reappear as the spectres of a lost age, briefly re-illuminated by memory.
In Nijinsky's Rite of Spring, reconstructed by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, there are distinct elements of clowning - the men's pointy hats, for example, and their cantering pony-steps. But nightmares are always seasoned with the absurd, and one can only wonder what terrible folk-memory Nijinsky was accessing when he created this piece. BRB's production is far tighter than the poorly-rehearsed Kirov version that visited us in 2003, and Carol-Anne Millar's catatonic terror as the Chosen Maiden is unforgettable.
