An obsession with sex and death underlies many of the immortal works of 19th-century classical ballet. Giselle is seduced, La Sylphide does the seducing, the Sleeping Beauty is awakened by sex, the Swan Queen is an apparition of death to Prince Siegfried who is easily waylaid by her doppelgänger, Odile of the 32 fouettées. Roland Petit brought it all out in the open with his ballets in the next century. As one observer said in 1949 of the premiere in London of his ballet Carmen, you could see the men’s trouser buttons popping.

Like planets crossing in the skies, light years apart, but by some ocular illusion coinciding, this conjunction of the two most thrilling young Bolshoi stars in the world and Frederick Ashton’s rarely staged Romeo and Juliet really must be seen. Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev are real-life lovers as well as phenomenal work colleagues and passionate actors. The freshness of youth, the unhindered outpouring of emotion, the finish of their dancing, and their direct stage personalities enrich to bursting a chamber-sized telling of the tragedy that's refreshingly intimate by comparison with the more popular blockbuster versions.

“What I love about her is her emotion, her true emotion. She’s a ball of energy and emotion all together, quite an amazing thing. From the first time I saw her, I thought I want her to be my girlfriend.” Ivan Vasiliev, the young Bolshoi Ballet superstar, is talking about his girlfriend - though he could also be Romeo talking about Juliet.

Roland Petit died this morning aged 87, a world choreographer of chic and erotic theatricality who blew away the French classical ideal in a roar of post-war sexual liberation. He created an all-male corps of swans for Swan Lake long before Matthew Bourne, and his roles for his exquisite wife, Zizi Jeanmaire, repositioned ballet drama upon the femme fatale rather than the virgin. Arguably, though, for British ballet-goers he was above all the seducer who almost lured Margot Fonteyn away to France (and who got her to have a nose job) just as she was leading the Sadler’s Wells Ballet to international glory. Had Fonteyn done so, the history of Britain’s ballet would have been different.

It's not often that we in the critical world revisit a production towards the end of a run to see how it's settled. I had two reasons for wanting to return to Christopher Alden's English National Opera production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. First, I wanted to hear the liquid-gold countertenor of Iestyn Davies in action as Oberon, since he'd been voice-indisposed for one night only (and superbly doubled in that capacity by William Towers).

Public feuding, private sorrows: the elemental passions of Verdi's Ligurian power struggle haven't had a vivid London staging since the Alden-Fielding ENO classic gave it a guiding (or, according to taste, hindering) giant hand in the late 1980s. Dmitri Tcherniakov, the most disciplined opera director to have come out of Russia, was a clever choice for the company to invite to the Coliseum.

Just think, said a veteran enthusiast of Britten's operas when I showed him the earliest publicity designs for Christopher Alden's production, you could set them all in a school, even Gloriana - what about headmistress Bess and head prefect Essex? But could you squidge everything into the one shape, I wondered? At ENO, it makes instant sense in the composer's near-perfect musical translation of Shakespearean wood magic that Oberon is the schoolmaster who prefers changeling pre-pubescents to now-adolescent, discarded Pucks. That's the strongest of starting points.

Contemporary music and 11 new productions are at the heart of a strong ENO 2011-12 season announced today.

Ballet galas are a curious institution. They mimic the form of “Greatest Hits” recordings, but what you get are rarely greatest hits, because they can’t be. Dance develops in its own time, its unfolding being an essential part of the magic. Rip a pas de deux (and galas circle around pas de deux like vultures in the Gobi desert) from its context, and you get pure dance, certainly; flashy dance, more than likely; lots of pyrotechnics, almost inevitably. But you don’t get the core, the magic, the reason people return over and over and over.