As a choreographer, Alexei Ratmansky is unique. A quiet man, he rode the tiger of the Bolshoi directorship between 2004 and 2008 before accepting his current post as artist in residence at American Ballet Theatre. What marks him out as a dance-maker is that while the ballets he creates are unimpeachably classical, they are also unmistakably of today. They're not pastiche Kenneth MacMillan or George Balanchine, they are newly minted Ratmansky, and everybody wants one.
Set to Jean Françaix's orchestrations of Chopin's Preludes Op 28, 24 Preludes is the first Ratmansky ballet made for a British company. It's a beautifully fashioned piece for eight dancers, and pays thoughtful and decorous homage to the company's heritage. So we get quicksilver footwork and summery Frederick Ashton romanticism, tempered by a shiver of Antony Tudor regret, and cast in an enigmatic light by fleeting parallels to Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering.
Each prelude portrays a scene in miniature. Ratmansky's choreography is seamless throughout, an unfurling tracery of centripetal classicism that calls on deep technique rather than flashy hyperextension. Leanne Benjamin, in particular, appears joyously liberated by a dance language that is at once so formal, each turn and curve cutting back on itself with rococo precision, and so intuitive in its femininity.
Sarah Lamb gets it too, this sensual interplay between 18th-century protocol and 21st-century womanhood. You can see it in the way that she finishes a pirouette with her arms circled above her head en couronne, and then, with a triumphant little uptilt of the chin, turns her palms outwards. It's a tiny subversion, but it makes for the kind of nuanced moment of which Ratmansky is master, and Lamb, with her close-up, cinematic beauty, the perfect interpreter.
The style doesn't suit everyone. Edward Watson isn't really a rococo kind of guy; everything that makes him right for Wayne McGregor's ballets, or for the transformative role of Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, which he is currently rehearsing with choreographer Arthur Pita, makes Watson wrong for this. He's too taut-wired, too off-classical, even as the romantic outsider. Rupert Pennefather, by contrast, takes flight. Centred and authoritative in his dancing, suddenly and inexplicably goaded into petulance by Zenaida Yanowsky's serene melancholy, he commands the stage from his first entrance.
Elements of the piece threaten to tip it into sentimentality. Françaix's orchestration dusts the proceedings with icing sugar, and while the women shimmer fetchingly enough in Colleen Atwood's silvery dresses, the men's gauzy, high-waisted blouses do them few favours. There is also a case to be made for editing the work. But all in all, the compliment that Ratmansky pays the Royal Ballet is profound.
The triple bill that introduces 24 Preludes opens with Balanchine's Apollo – confidently executed by Carlos Acosta on opening night – and closes with Aeternum, a new work by Christopher Wheeldon. The piece is set to Benjamin Britten's 1940 Sinfonia da Requiem, a dark and intense work whose warning chords the wise choreographer ignores at his peril. The ballet's central figure is a woman – Marianela Nuñez on opening night, Claire Calvert at the second performance – who is partnered by two men, following a convulsive opening solo. Wheeldon remains wedded to the notion of the acrobatic duet, with the woman manipulated and hoisted aloft as a kind of pièce montée, but it's striking how fatigued this idiom is beginning to look, especially after Ratmansky's tender, even-handed encounters.
The piece is impressively designed by Jean-Marc Puissant, with an elaborately evolving set composed of feathery driftwood boards. Cohorts of ensemble dancers form enigmatic, splintering clusters. It all looks very handsome and significant, even if it's impossible to tell what any of it is about. The principals make the most of the material – Nuñez all sinuous plastique, Calvert scooping sensuous curves from the air – but their anguished emoting is as puzzling as everything else in a work whose music, design and choreography all seem to be telling different stories. Wheeldon's facility as a dance-maker is unquestionable, but sometimes it's hard to see past the craft to the idea.
