“Rhapsody,” choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton in 1980, has a deliciously understated royal origin: an eightieth-birthday tribute to the Queen Mother. Created for Mikhail Baryshnikov, then guesting with the Royal Ballet, and Lesley Collier as the central couple, the pas de deux, often performed as an excerpt, staged a fascinating encounter between Russian virtuosity and British refinement. Ashton’s classicism rests on beauty, rigour, and harmony, but remains open to melancholy and emotional release. Silvia Saint-Martin and Marc Moreau were excellent interpreters in what they do best: she, almost glacial in her technical assurance, with an astonishing beauty of line and movement; he, an exceptionally skilful dancer and generous partner, who brought a welcome softness to the duet. And yet, the performance preserved the brilliance and control of the work more fully than its poetic breadth, and this deeper transport did not always come through. This impression was reinforced by the visual frame: unlike the Royal Ballet’s return to William Chappell’s original aesthetic, the Paris Opéra Ballet version uses Patrick Caulfield’s designs, whose golden yellow and deep red palette gives the work a more emphatically graphic quality, one that seems to hold back its sense of abandon and emotional overflow. What was missing, perhaps, was that breathing virtuosity that gives the pas de deux its moving character. Once again, the live music, performed by an ensemble of four strings, three winds, and piano from the Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris, beautifully rendered the sweeping lyricism of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.”

The musical enchantment continued with the Adagio from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, which seemed to carry the whole world of Angelin Preljocaj’s “Le Parc” into the Louvre and draw everything towards the famous whirlwind kiss. Unlike the preceding Ashton excerpt, this was Paris Opéra Ballet territory in the most unmistakable sense, entirely at home in its own legend. Whenever Dorothée Gilbert and Hugo Marchand meet on stage, or wherever else they dance, the air seems to shift. Their performance in the Place de la Bastille during the Olympic Torch Relay in July 2024 had already shown that this kind of alchemy can work in any setting. There is a rare quality in this couple: a complete fit, a mutual resonance shaped by a long history of dancing together, but also by a grace that seems to arrive from elsewhere, beyond control and almost beyond the human. Everything felt precise, but carried by that kind of ease that makes beauty look inevitable. The fact that the pas de deux was extracted from the ballet did not diminish its impact at all; rather the opposite. One was left thinking, perhaps unfairly but irresistibly, that “Le Parc” is this duo, and that all other versions are, somehow, copies.