Review:Birmingham Royal Ballet

Technically the international cast was outstanding, nowhere more so than in Hans van Manen’s choreography for 5 Tangos to music by Astor Piazzolla. Complex and split-second movements are a required prerequisite, the final tango, for the 14 dancers, a fiendishly difficult virtuoso show-piece that brought long and sustained applause.

The accompaniment came from a pre-recorded tape to accommodate the Latin-American instruments required, but elsewhere it was provided by members of the Royal Ballet Sinfonia conducted by Philip Ellis. For the gentle humour of the ballet, Solitaire, Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography used an extended version of Malcolm Arnold’s orchestral score of eight English Dances, the perky Laura Day particularly outstanding as a playmate for Arancha Baselga in the leading role of the ‘Solitary Girl’.

Finally an outburst of fun in Charles Mackerras’s arrangement of music taken from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas to create Pineapple Poll, the story of how the young women of Portsmouth fall in love with the dashing, Captain Belaye, here danced by the athletic Mathias Dingman, with Nao Sakuma as the vivacious Poll.