Birmingham Royal Ballet

David Denton ****

Ballet is becoming such a scarce commodity in North Yorkshire that the annual brief visit to York by the Birmingham Royal Ballet is a most welcome luxury.

They brought a showcase of extracts from four of their outstanding productions together with a complete staging of George Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue to music by Richard Rogers. We had to be content for much of the evening with pre-recorded music, the theatre’s absence of an orchestra pit leaving only room for the company’s chamber group.

The cast list was long and featured a number of the company’s major dancers.Ambra Vallo created a charmingly naughty Swanilde for part of the second act Coppelia.

For the Act 3 pas de deux of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, you could see the athletic Matthew Lawrence planning his explosive moments within the limited space, while Laetitia Lo Sardo, as his Princess Aurora was by turns a brilliant and delicate Princess Aurora. Yet it was the high-kicking long legs of Celine Gittins as the Striptease Girl and Robert Parker’s sultry Hoofer in Balanchine’s comedy that was the highlight of the evening.