Ravel’s La Valse begins with just a suggestion of disintegration and ends with a fatal, ecstatic collapse. The waltz pulses throughout, the music gliding, slipping, at times languid, at others vigorous. Frederick Ashton’s choreography was pleasantly humorous, and often very beautiful, with the soft shades of the women’s costumes twirling like faded petals.

But the choreography, and Barry Wordsworth’s conducting, did not attempt to capture the shattering breakdown in the music; the waltz simply carried blithely on throughout the crashing tympani and brass. Perhaps it was meant to evoke the Austro-Hungarian empire, in which the ballet was set, doomed to failure but blind to their collapse, which was rather effectively suggested as the curtain started to fall even before the piece had ended and the dance had stopped.

Sparse as the two words, though rich in the psychology between them, the highly nuanced pas de deux of Kim Brandstrup’s Invitus Invitam was powerful and beautifully achieved. The title is taken from Suetonius and the ‘plot’ derived from Racine’s Berenice. The beauty of the dancing was sadly confused and overshadowed by projections of classical architectural elements, further confounded by the projection of a sort-of romanticized medieval town house. Perhaps we were meant to think of the classical world of Suetonius; but then somehow rustic chivalry doesn’t work with Racine. The cumulative effect was a mess of post-modernist, ‘classical’ revival of a chivalric age. Confused? I was.

The set concluded with Kenneth Macmillan’s version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, entitled Winter Dreams, and Theme and Variations, George Balanchine’s homage to the palmy days of St. Petersberg’s ballets in the time of the Tsars. MacMillan’s work was episodic but did capture at times the essence of Chekhov’s writing, with its intricate family feuds in a disintegrating bourgeois atmosphere, made clear by a richly-furnished dining room glowing mysteriously behind gauze throughout the piece.

Balanchine’s glitzy, lightly frivolous work was kept in check by extraordinary technical feats which went on almost ad nauseam. Sergei Polunin’s double tour en l’air followed by a pirouette was startling, though the piece became repetitive and sickly, as if I had been fed macaroons for an hour.

But then that is what the Royal Opera House does well.