The Koh-i-Noor in this Diamond Celebration of 60 years of the Friends of the Royal Opera House garnered the least applause: Dispatch, a dazzlingly lucid duet newly choreographed by Pam Tanowitz, to a thrilling thrash of a score by Ted Hearne. Dressed in 1960s sports kit with white floppy short shorts, William Bracewell and Anna Rose O’Sullivan engage in a steely contest that brings them together and forces them apart, their arms flattened and their faces expressionless as they push and pull, box and fence. Echoes of Merce Cunningham and Balanchine’s Agon abound – who is in control here? – but Tanowitz has an entirely distinctive style of her own that is both witty and cogent.

There are no loose ends, no dead patches where the music is merely reflected; every step counts, every flick, turn and bend registers, and Bracewell and O’Sullivan deliver them with forensic concentration and precision. This is ballet of complex formal intensity, and the moment it ended, I wanted to see it again, never mind the tepid reception.

Nothing else had quite the same impact on me, but there was something for everyone in a generously long programme and I’m certainly not complaining about the overall quality of the Royal Ballet’s current dancing – it’s as high as I can remember for decades. (And at this point let me just slip in praise for Melissa Hamilton and Lukas B Braendsrod in Wayne McGregor’s unnervingly sexy Qualia.)

Of the other novelties, the most feeble was a wisp of fluff by Benoit Swan Pouffer for Natalia Osipova and Steven McRae. Osipova seems to have either bad luck or bad judgment when it comes to her admirable appetite for new work. I was more engaged by the ambition behind Joseph Toonga’s See Us!!, a passionate exploration of the body language in protest and riot, but after Joseph Sissens’s bracingly defiant solo, it deflated. Stick with Toonga: I have a hunch that next time, he might well come up with something sensational.

Two showcases mirrored each other in focusing on a quartet of dancers: men, in the case of Christopher Wheeldon’s For Four (first seen in 2006, but new to the Royal Ballet), and women, in Valentino Zucchetti’s Prima. Wheeldon has the temerity to use Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet, but he doesn’t inhabit its eerie melancholy: the steps never transcend classroom routine, and even the exquisite purity of line and noble carriage of Vadim Muntagirov can’t make them more than slickly mundane. Zucchetti chose some more superficial Saint-Saëns and created a cheerful divertissement in which Fumi Kaneko shone brightest alongside Yasmine Naghdi, Francesca Hayward and Mayara Magri.

The climax of the show was the ‘Diamonds’ act from Jewels. Is it heresy to suggest that this hugely popular work is second-class Balanchine? It seems to me a very skilful exercise in the grand Maryinsky manner, but choreographically it’s not as inflected as his comparable Ballet Imperial or the fiendishly difficult Theme and Variations – and its first section, to the ‘Alla tedesca’ of Tchaikosky’s Third Symphony is downright banal. The Andante pas de deux, a wary love poem, loses its emotional ambiguities without its original muse Suzanne Farrell, and it’s only the dashing parade-ground manoeuvres of the final ensemble that send us home happy.

Anyway, the Royal performs it very elegantly, with Reece Clarke providing a courtly, handsome and accomplished partner for Farrell’s avatar Marianela Nunez. My problem with the latter is that she can be a bit goody-goody – absolutely straight-ten impeccable in style and technique, all boxes ticked. But here I wished she would take a few Farrell-like imaginative risks – bend an inch deeper, turn a fraction faster, play with the music more wilfully, and grin rather less glacially. Her copybook excellence is marvellously reliable, but the deeper mystique of the prima ballerina – withholding as much as she gives, commanding rather than obeying – never glows through her unflappably sunny persona.

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