London audiences are most likely to hear a summer performance of Elgar's Sea Pictures at the Proms. But this storm-tossed song cycle is also the score of Christopher Wheeldon's recent work for San Francisco Ballet. And if the Albert Hall makes us imagine the music in late-Victorian drawing rooms, Wheeldon's ballet emphatically places it in the open air.
Sepia photos of beach scenes and gale-strewn waves add vistas of air and light to the stage, and running through the choreography is a sense of larger horizons and unknown currents.
It is nearly a very good ballet. Though Wheeldon is famously slick as an organiser of steps, he nearly always finds a quality of space and sensuality that becomes the secret of each separate work.
In Sea Pictures you feel the pull of the ocean in the rolling impulse of the dancers' phrasing and sudden spurts of activity. You read a narrative of exhilaration, melancholy, romanticism and loss that isn't just a string of generic ballet moods but is driven by specific characters.
The problem is that these elements are over-egged by the design: large grey rocks that clutter the side of the stage and period "fisherfolk" dress. These impose qualities of quaintness and sentimentality that aren't in the choreo-graphy. The ballet would look more confident and independent without them.
It's hard to know what would rescue Balanchine's Bugaku. This ballet is arguably an aberration within his oeuvre, given its fake Japanese decor and movement. Yet the extreme fetishisation of the ballerina's body (Lucia Lacarra, turning herself into a narcissistic, eerily supple blank, is perfect here) could be seen as an extreme revelation of the erotic fascination in all Balanchine's work.
The ballet's climactic duet is bizarrely beautiful and much the strongest part of the work, as is the main pas de deux in Jerome Robbins's Glass Pieces. Set to music by Philip Glass, this is largely a dutiful exercise in mass energy and urban edginess.
In the duet, however, the huge cast of dancers pass along the back of the stage in a gently buzzing frieze of movement - Egyptian hieroglyphs moving in a bleeping electronic current. In front, the two principals coil their bodies around each other as the work's skippy exuberance calms to real grandeur.
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