Ballo della Regina is a strange piece, for many reasons. A piece of minor Balanchine, it was created late in life for a dancer he clearly admired but who was not core to his vision. Strangest of all, he used music by Verdi, a composer whose music he had only choreographed to in his very early days as a journeyman opera-house ballet-master, when he did not get to choose.

I wasn’t around to see when Karole Armitage won her spurs in her twenties as a punk ballet choreographer in America in the 1970s and early Eighties, so we must rely on her programme-sheet biography to explain to us that she is “seen by some critics as the true choreographic heir" to George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham. After last night’s dismal showing by her group, Armitage Gone! Dance, at the Southbank Centre, the only possible response is, “Pull the other one” and a firm slap across the hubris.

Current affairs can be an on-trend choreographer's nemesis. In the new triple bill at the Royal Ballet last night, you could watch a new video-game war-ballet by Wayne McGregor, while blotting out thoughts of the Taliban suicide massacre in yesterday’s headlines, and Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV, with its modish wrecked train set, while trying to forget that yesterday expensive retribution was demanded of Network Rail for the Potter's Bar train crash.

What a difference 24 hours can make. The first night of ABT’s pick‘n’mix season – 10 ballets in six days – veered from “fine” on downwards. Another opening, another show, though, and things have picked up very nicely indeed. Ballet Theatre has on display in this programme its peerless historical range, from Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas (mounted on the company in 1940), through Balanchine’s Theme and Variations (choreographed for them in 1947), his 1960 Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and finally, and most wonderfully, Paul Taylor’s miraculous Company B: a piece that makes you want to dance, to sing, and fills you with a sorrowing pity, all at the same time.

What a difference 24 hours can make. The first night of ABT’s pick‘n’mix season – 10 ballets in six days – veered from “fine” on downwards. Another opening, another show, though, and things have picked up very nicely indeed. Ballet Theatre has on display in this programme its peerless historical range, from Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas (mounted on the company in 1940), through Balanchine’s Theme and Variations (choreographed for them in 1947), his 1960 Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and finally, and most wonderfully, Paul Taylor’s miraculous Company B: a piece that makes you want to dance, to sing, and fills you with a sorrowing pity, all at the same time.

It is rare that you read a book, and mentally shout “Yes! Yes!” as you tick off all the things you agree with, but had never actually verbalised. It is even rarer to read a book where, in a subject you know pretty well, on almost every page you learn at least one fascinating new thing. But Jennifer Homans’ Apollo’s Angels is that book.

We’re getting used to expecting the extraordinary from Natalia Osipova - and then getting some more. With her impish face and farouche capriciousness, with a spring like a high-jumper and shoulders like a swimmer, she is without doubt the most explosively delightful comedienne and virtuoso around at the Bolshoi, but could she be a Giselle? A weak-hearted innocent, a sorrowing ghost, an angel of pleading mercy? Doubt it not.

"It was more than just 'I love you'," Suzanne Farrell, America's nonpareil ballerina, the love and inspiration of 20th-century ballet's greatest choreographer, is telling me at breakfast in a little bar in Lee, Massachusetts. "When people ask me to explain about George Balanchine and myself, I can't put it into words. As Mr B said, 'You don't ask a rose to explain itself.' Some things are unexplainable. Perhaps if you analysed it, you would destroy it."

If you tell a tall, whisper-slim young woman of 31 that she has been described as "the soul of Russia", it is understandable that she looks startled. Two huge, smoke-grey eyes cast a doubtful glance at me, and she murmurs in Russian. Her translator announces: "That is a very serious declaration."

THE choreographer George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983, aged 79, of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, a rare, if nowadays notorious, condition only discovered at his autopsy. What had been recognised long before his death, though, was that this man was one of the very greatest geniuses of the 20th century, a figure to be reckoned alongside Pablo Picasso in art and Igor Stravinsky in music.