Nicely covering the many bases of Frederick Ashton's genius, the Royal Ballet triple bill which opened last night is a chance to see both the company and its founder choreographer on top form. The Dream shows Ashton at his narrative best, handling comedy and kisses with equal aplomb.

Koen Kessels is on a mission to change the culture around music in ballet. Anyone who has heard the Belgian conduct will know that he is the right person for the job: Kessels makes the classic scores come alive in the pit like nobody else I’ve heard. I will never forget a performance of Swan Lake with Birmingham Royal Ballet in which he had us all pinned to our seats with excitement, shaping every phrase of the familiar music as if it had never been heard before.

Liam Scarlett must be worked off his feet. Just at the Royal Ballet, he made a full-length work, Frankenstein, last year and is currently working on a new Swan Lake; and now last night he has premiered a new abstract work, Symphonic Dances at the Royal Opera House.

Sure, there are things not to like about Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling. Confusing plot. Plethora of characters. Unsympathetic (anti-)hero. Borderline melodramatic choreography. Tense, scary dénouement. But to be at the Royal Opera House last night was to be convinced that Mayerling's merits far outweigh its demerits.

Balanchine's Jewels is catnip to dedicated ballet lovers.

Can thirty minutes of contemporary ballet say something meaningful about the modern refugee crisis? It has been the surprise of the season to find myself asking this question not once, but twice, at the Royal Ballet.

Classical dancers conventionally have the briefest of all performing careers in the arts, knowing from the very beginning that they'll be lucky to have 20 years of performing at the top of their abilities, after at least 10 years training from childhood onwards. But Dame Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991) was a phenomenon, dancing into her sixties, for reasons that this painful and affectionate programme tactfully explored.

Christmas - in the shape of Peter Wright's Nutcracker - has arrived earlier than usual at the Royal Opera House. This is to make space for a 70th anniversary run of The Sleeping Beauty that starts on 21 December: the two will run in tandem through the holiday period, scheduling that assumes audiences can't get enough of Tchaikovsky-and-tutus at Christmas. And I'm sure they can't, when the purveyors of said delights are the Royal Ballet.

In a world of terrifyingly serious news, the opening of the Royal Ballet season with Frederick Ashton's pastoral frolic La Fille mal gardée might seem like a wanton disregard for reality, like a brass band playing "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside" as the Titanic goes down. But that is to misunderstand the reason Fille is so beloved is that it has at its heart a perfectly serious and realistic topic: young love.

It was twelfth night for Christopher Wheeldon's two-year-old, three-act Shakespearean ballet, and this newcomer had one nervous anticipatory question. The verbal music is gone, only the plot remains, so could A Winter's Tale the play inspire Wheeldon to imaginative heights in the way that Romeo and Juliet brought out the best in MacMillan, via Prokofiev?