Mariinsky Ballet's The Firebird Triple Bill, Royal Opera House

Bobbing in the wake of the Mariinsky’s box-office blockbusters Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet, comes this attractive triple bill boasting two story ballets, one of them as meatily romantic as anyone could wish, and one feel-good abstract dance number.

The Firebird (1910) has choreography by Michel Fokine  and music by a very young Igor Stravinsky (Firebird was his first big ballet score).  While being fabulously Russian in every aspect of its conception, it began life in Europe as an instant hit for the itinerant Ballets Russes and has only recently entered the Mariinsky’s repertory. That said, its glamour and big Russian energy will suit these dancers down to the ground and there’s a strong sense that they’re now claiming it as theirs

The story is a cocktail of disparate Russian folk tales - about a magical bird that can be both a blessing and curse, an evil magician who defies death, a prince who woos a captive princess, and the founding of Moscow – all that and more is packed into 45 minutes.

Marguerite and Armand , from 1963, was conceived by the choreographer Frederick Ashton as a star vehicle for a hot celebrity couple: the recently defected Rudolf Nureyev and the much older British prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn . Throughout the 1960s and '70s it was danced exclusively by these two, and after their deaths not at all. It was said  Ashton would not countenance any other casting. In recent years, however, this has changed, and revivals have featured stars such as Sylvie Guillem, Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin . The latter has also danced the ballet with the Bolshoi’s Svetlana Zakharova .  Now the Mariinsky get the opportunity to put their mark on it.

The narrative is drawn from the same source as Verdi’s opera La Traviata, depicting the burgeoning love between a consumptive courtesan and her much younger lover, who is eventually forced by social pressure to renounce her. Setting the story to Franz Liszt’s stormingly romantic Piano Sonata in B minor , Ashton concentrates the play’s tragic essence in choreography of great intensity. Fonteyn recalled that even rehearsals for the work contained “a passion more real than life itself” .

The wild card in the triple bill is the contemporary work by the Russian-in-exile Alexei Ratmansky .  An abstract-ish work, it is set to  Dmitri Shostakovich’ s light-hearted Second Piano Concerto, composed in 1957. The DSCH of the title derives from the musical motif taken from the German spelling of the composer’s name: D.Sch. For his part, Ratmansky is known as a choreographer whose work, though rarely outrageously inventive or even surprisingly original, is lyrical, engaging and audience-friendly.  Moira Macdonald, critic of the Seattle Times, wrote: “Concerto DSCH is crammed full of playful detail and nuance; when it’s over,all you want is to see it again. ”