One could soundly advise any choreographer to avoid music so transcendentally great in itself that dance can add nothing except banal images. Only a handful of exceptions sneak past the rule: MacMillan’s setting of Song of the Earth, perhaps, and also Hans van Manen’s Adagio Hammerklavier, his audacious attempt to visualise the infinitely slow movement of Beethoven’s epic piano sonata Op. 106.

Northern Ballet has honourably revived this haunting masterpiece as part of its autumnal triple bill, and its impact overshadows the two novelties that frame it. What is its secret? Van Manen doesn’t attempt to illustrate the music or even to suggest any emotional import: the movement of six dancers in white is entirely chaste and abstracted, an act of entranced listening devoid of any strenuous virtuosity or personality.

Next to it Benjamin Ella’s Joie de Vivre seemed pretty and pleasant but a bit pointless: a riff on the innocent girls-meet-boys camaraderie underlying Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering that comes to life only in two sparky pas de trois. Salon pieces for violin and piano by Sibelius make for a monochrome score.

There’s more dramatic substance to Intimate Pages, set to three movements of Janacek’s Second String Quartet. In something of a coup for Northern Ballet’s incoming director Federico Bonelli, it’s been choreographed by the New York City Ballet star Tiler Peck, and even if she doesn’t seem blessed with any startling originality, she has shaped something coherent and engaging.

A tormented outsider (the spirited Harris Beattie) searches restlessly for someone or something, his efforts focused on three women who don’t quite fit the bill. In marked contrast to the slowness of Adagio Hammerklavier, Peck is drawn to exploit ballet’s potential for speed, and the fastness becomes at times almost feverish – the pace admirably met by some of Northern Ballet’s junior dancers rising to the challenge.

The programme travels to the Linbury Theatre, and despite my reservations, I think it’s worth catching.

Alvin Ailey was the black American choreographer who crested the tide of the Civil Rights movement and rescued African-American dance from folkloric cliché. Although he succumbed in 1989 to that other cultural turning point Aids, his company has lived on, focused on his legacy but also incorporating a wide range of new work. The idea of a dance company based on skin colour or racial origin may now seem a bit redundant and, dare I say it, jejune, but here is a troupe that is highly accomplished with an interesting repertory. No individuals stand out; this is an ensemble with a collective identity that rejects the concept of stardom.

The first of the four programmes of its UK visit opened with Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings?, a quirky and playful round of the mating game, both smart and casual: fun, but not memorable. Of the two elegant cameos by the company’s artistic director Robert Battle that followed, I was more impressed by Unfold, a duet of languorous sensuality danced by Ashley Mayeux and Jeroboam Bozeman to a recording of Leontyne Price’s gorgeous singing of ‘Depuis le jour’.

But it was Ailey’s classic Revelations that hit the spot. Dating from 1960 and influenced by the credo of Martha Graham, it is full of earthy squats and exultant arms expressive of agony and ecstasy – a deeply felt response to traditional spirituals and an almost nostalgic homage to the exuberant gospel religion of the Deep South. Even the most cynical will find it impossible not to be charmed by its naive charm and sincerity, culminating in a finale worthy of a Broadway musical in which holy rollers start jiving, bright yellow parasols twirl and jumping joy is unconfined.