Les Biches
A Nijinska ballet is a fitting part of an Ashton season, for her example as a choreographer had a large influence on Ashton, who watched her work when he was a young dancer in Paris in the late 1920s. This charming and witty piece leaves a number of resonances in the lighter touches of Ashton's ballets, and there is - to this eye anyway - an interesting comparison to be made between Nijinska's way with upper body movement in shaping character and revealing emotion, and Ashton's technique.
      Les Biches is an evocation of the social whirl on the 1920s Riviera. Darcey Bussell and Leanne Benjamin are perfect as, respectively, the Hostess and the Girl in Blue, Bussell hamming the role just as it should be hammed, Benjamin dancing the Adagietto with exquisite doll-like containment. Poulenc's score (it is the composition that gave him his start as a young man of 24) must have given Nijinska many cues to the subtle quirky humour and pastel shadings she arrived at in the choreography, for music and dance speak to each other in exactly the same language.
      The three athletic young men are danced with commendably straight faces by Bennett Gartside, Thomas Whitehead and Martin Harvey, the latter as the lead young man who dances the Andantino with Leanne Benjamin. They bring the Mediterranean beach onto the stage, while the ballerinas bring onto it the salon and the promenade. An amusing minor tug-of-war results, the salon of course winning.
      Les Biches could conceivably be played for larger laughs, but the understatement and slyness of the humour is an attractive feature of the piece, which must in part account for the fact that it has entered the repertoire as a staple. Something oblique and quietly mad about the atmosphere it creates is what gives it its attraction, and it offers dancers a chance to enjoy themselves - which they manifestly did in this revival.

Symphonic Variations
In all the breadth, variety and number of Ashton's works, so great in all three dimensions that it is impossible to capture their shared essence in a single definition, there are certain ballets which stand out as particular achievements. His absolute ballets - Scenes de Ballet, Enigma Variations and the exquisite Symphonic Variations - have a very special place. Ashton himself said that if he was forced to save just one of his pieces, he would nominate Scenes de Ballet; but many of his admirers would choose the Symphonic Variations instead. And they would do so for the reasons made richly manifest in this performance: its charm, ease and beauty.
      Not that it can be easy to dance. The demands Ashton made for the 'classic lower body, romantic upper body' combination can only be met (as Alina Cojocaru meets them, for one outstanding example) by an instinctive sympathy with Ashton's aims, for in the passages where the demands are most acute, a dancer has to be in thought some way from where she or he is in body: in the future of the movement, transcending the limits of the given present moment.
      The dancers relate to each other rather as do the piano and orchestra in Franck's music: in juxtaposition, not eye to eye. The dreamlike quality of the encounters and passings is intentional. The dancers are almost as six soloists sharing a stage, and there is no single moment when the patterns they form are not in evolution. For all the fluidity of the piece, though, there is a delicate complexity underlying it, and it has to be well danced to work. Alina Cojocaru, Federico Bonelli, Johan Kobborg, and Belinda Hatley are superb; and so too are Laura Morera and Steven McRae, both replacements, who danced as if they had been first choice all along. The young Steven McRae, only lately scene dancing in a ballet school performance, is an extremely promising talent, and made his mark with this opportunity: remember the name.

A Month in the Country
Ashton's outstanding narrative gift is in full flow in this adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's play. Three acts are summarised into forty minutes of ballet constituting a single act, but all the mimetic powers of dance, and Ashton's genius at weaving them into a moving and memorable whole, are sharply focused here. Turgenev was a poet of unrequitable romance, and his exploration of the tenderness and bitterness of such passion, undertaken best in his short novels, is prefigured in A Month in the Country. It is one of his earliest mature works, written when he still intended to be a dramatist rather than a novelist.
      The story is ready-made for Ashton. The choice of Chopin (in a characteristically brilliant arrangement by John Lanchbery) was the result of two happy accidents in succession: first, Ashton asked Sir Isaiah Berlin at a party what would suit a balletic interpretation of Turgenev's play, and Berlin after a few minutes' thought nominated Chopin; and secondly, the early Chopin pieces Ashton eventually chose turned out to be the perfect vehicle for the compressed and distilled version of the story as Ashton arranged it.
      Sylvie Guillem's wonderfully expressive dancing makes her Natalia Petrovna a very sympathetic figure: loveable, loved and loving, but in a cruelly unrealisable way. She is the pivot on which the ballet turns, for all the other roles centre upon her like the spokes of a wheel. Massimo Murru's Beliaev, danced with long, loose-limbed fervour, and Natasha Oughtred's vivid and vigorous Vera, complement her perfectly. Giacomo Ciriaci's Kolia is an entirely plausible small boy, and it is not the least among the wonders of the design that the kite given to him by Beliaev actually flies as he himself races energetically around the stage.
      But the weight of the piece lies in the moments when Beliaev and Natalia confess their mutual passion, only to realise and accept its utter impossibility; and when Vera pours out her charm, youth and hope to Beliaev, and he affectionately turns her down. These scenes were beautifully danced - and beautifully acted: when Beliaev kisses the unaware Natalia's ribbons, just before he leaves her forever, it is acting rather than dancing that is going on, and it is one of the most affecting moments of the whole.
      A lovely choreographic achievement is given its full due in this performance. It takes nothing away from the other principals to say that Sylvie Guillem is the key to it; dancing within herself, but with her inimitable fineness and feeling, she is always the focus of the drama, as if all the other dancers had invisible threads tied to her, down which the movement and flux of the whole transmitted itself. In all, a beautiful piece beautifully performed.
AC Grayling