Hovering way, way above us, three aptly named high fairies, in voluminous chiffon, open a show that may not be airy in the metaphorical sense, but invites us to cast our eyes upwards continually – no bad thing to do in the bleak midwinter of 2022. But does the show, delayed after one Covid cancellation after another on its spluttering debut 12 months ago, soar as a new show should? Give or take the odd clunky landing, it does.

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.

Australian Ballet's cinema broadcast on Tuesday night appears to have been a little under-publicised – at least in my local multiplex, which was deafeningly empty with just five spectators.

The Bolshoi Theatre reopened in late autumn 2011 after a problematic six-year refurbishment said to have cost a tidy billion dollars, many times its original estimate thanks to corruption - it needed a corker of a ballet premiere to pop the eyes of a cynical Russian public, and it set upon a new staging of The Sleeping Beauty. This was also problematic, as three years earlier it had been promised to the then ballet director Alexei Ratmansky, who had soon afterwards resigned his job, wretched and miserable with the corrosive relationships within the theatre.

If anyone who saw Matthew Bourne’s irreverent rewrite of The Sleeping Beauty currently at Sadler’s Wells is curious about the original classical ballet, they’ll find it in rousing glory and glinting style with English National Ballet at the Coliseum.

It depends what you expect. This is Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty. So what do you expect of (a) Matthew Bourne and (b) The Sleeping Beauty? On both counts I’d answer: much more than we get here. Bourne at his best is brilliant - his Swan Lake, his Play Without Words, are two of the most rewarding and entertaining (I mean moving the heart, as well as hugely gratifying the visual palate) shows in dance in the past generation. His Nutcracker! is young, sexy and amusing.

Has the great ballerina Tamara Rojo ever done a more nerveracking performance than she did last night in Milton Keynes? On her first night as player-manager of English National Ballet, both its new artistic director and its chief ballerina, she had to inhabit the skin of a dewy 16-year-old discovering the world - all the while watching the stage with the steel gaze of a boss to see if her employees were doing their job to standard.

As Mrs Thatcher used to say, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions. Solutions have been flung with a will at the problem ballet of Kenneth MacMillan’s last years, his orientalist fairytale The Prince of the Pagodas - the Royal Ballet’s retiring director Monica Mason revived it last night as one of her last presentations, determined that a new generation should have the chance to love it.

What kind of music damages the ears? Hard rock, most people would think, as they sigh at the tinny noise pumping through their neighbour’s cheap earphones on the Piccadilly Line. Even obsessive ballet fans, the kind who spend their last pennies on a bad amphitheatre seat with atrocious sight lines at Covent Garden because Alina Cojocaru is dancing, might not imagine that for musicians sitting in the orchestra pit, the sweeping curves of The Sleeping Beauty might not be quite so romantic. It’s perhaps more obvious with Aram Khachaturian’s score to Spartacus, the ballet which includes a slave rebellion and a wild orgy. But in both ballets, the problem is the same for musicians: the music is so loud, particularly when performed in the enclosed space of the orchestra pit, that it can damage their hearing.

What kind of music damages the ears? Hard rock, most people would think, as they sigh at the tinny noise pumping through their neighbour’s cheap earphones on the Piccadilly Line. Even obsessive ballet fans, the kind who spend their last pennies on a bad amphitheatre seat with atrocious sight lines at Covent Garden because Alina Cojocaru is dancing, might not imagine that for musicians sitting in the orchestra pit, the sweeping curves of The Sleeping Beauty might not be quite so romantic. It’s perhaps more obvious with Aram Khachaturian’s score to Spartacus, the ballet which includes a slave rebellion and a wild orgy. But in both ballets, the problem is the same for musicians: the music is so loud, particularly when performed in the enclosed space of the orchestra pit, that it can damage their hearing.