LONDON — Frederick Ashton’s ballets aren’t danced enough and they aren’t danced properly. A younger generation isn’t learning from the great dancers who originated the roles and great works are slipping into oblivion. Whatever the lament, the relative paucity of Ashton ballets in the Royal Ballet repertory over the last decade or so has been a perennial cause for complaint among ballet-lovers and critics here.
Ashton in England and George Balanchine in the United States were the two great figures of postwar ballet. But for various reasons — among them that Ashton was less prolific and, unlike Balanchine, was not the lifelong director of the company he worked with (he directed the Royal Ballet from 1963 to 1970) — his work has never been consistently dominant here. Story ballets like “La Fille Mal Gardée” and “The Dream” are performed fairly frequently, but there are plenty of other works that rarely see the stage.
Among them are the 1948 “Scènes de Ballet,” the 1946 “Symphonic Variations” and the 1976 “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan,” all on a welcome current program, with Ashton’s last great work, “A Month in the Country,” at the Royal Opera House. It’s the second all-Ashton program since Kevin O’Hare became the director of the company in 2012, suggesting a renewed focus on his work.
It’s a fascinating program, showing Ashton mostly as a choreographer of abstraction rather than in his better-known guise as a master-storyteller and an often-wry poet of the soul. “Scènes de Ballet,” which I had never seen, is set to a Stravinsky score of the same name written for a 1944 review at the Ziegfield Theater in New York. It’s an odd and compelling mix of modernism and icy classicism, costumed with Parisian chic by André Beaurepaire.
“Is this Ashton’s answer to Balanchine?” a colleague asked at intermission. (The two men admired one another’s work, although Ashton’s admiration seems to have been more unstinting.) If it is, it is a very different response to Stravinsky’s astringent rhythms and shifting time-signatures.
Ashton’s structure is a fairly traditional one, with his principal couple (Sarah Lamb, impeccable if not radiant, and Steven McRae, unimpeachable) framed by 12 corps de ballet women and a male quartet. The women wear tutus and the work makes numerous references to “The Sleeping Beauty” — particularly in the ballerina’s first variation and her Rose Adagio-like dance with the four men.
But the movement and patternings are coolly geometric (Ashton came to rehearsals clutching a second-hand volume on advanced geometry) and the movement has an automaton, staccato quality. Heads turn sharply side to side. A passage in which the ballerina is lifted just off the ground in passé (one leg bent so that the foot points to the inner knee) by her partner is echoed successively by quartets of women, so that the movement and musical rhythms seem to pass through the bodies like a current of air. No sooner has it finished than you want to see it again, to work out how it is constructed, to understand its strangeness.
“Symphonic Variations,” generally regarded as Ashton’s masterpiece, is a work of limpid simplicity and extreme difficulty. Set to César Franck’s score of the same name, with a ravishing yellow-green backdrop by Sophie Fedorovitch, it presents a neoclassical world of stillness and flowing motion that suggests something both ancient (the women wear Grecian tunics) and enduring. On Tuesday night, only Vadim Muntagirov truly embodied the luminous nobility and purity of the choreography. Valentino Zucchetti, Luca Acri, Melissa Hamilton, Yasmine Naghdi and Leticia Stock, all talented but still not at home in the ballet, occasionally found repose in the movement, but not often enough.
“Five Brahms Waltzes,” performed by a game Helen Crawford, is a curiosity, created for the singular talents of Lynn Seymour in the same year that Ashton used her for “A Month in the Country,” which is based on a play by Turgenev. It was this last ballet that came together most fully on Tuesday, with every one of its eight-member cast perfectly attuned to the nuances of choreography and drama.
Natalia Osipova, who has made her debut this season in the role of the restless, bored Natalia Petrovna, was almost unbearably touching in her realization that an infatuation with her son’s young tutor, Beliaev (Federico Bonelli), is a figment of her own unfulfilled needs.
Perhaps because it is performed more frequently, “A Month in the Country” showed off the wonders of Ashton’s technical inventions, the skimming runs, the filigree arms, the endlessly bending upper bodies. Ms. Osipova’s upper body, her lattice-like footwork, was a thing of wonder; Francesca Hayward as her ward Vera, hardly less so. Mr. Bonelli’s beautiful lines were augmented by sensitive acting. You could feel his youth and inexperience, his longing too.
The program at the Royal Opera House in London repeats on Nov. 4, 5, 11, 12.