Mark Morris Dance Group, Barbican, London

New Crowned Hope was the name of the Masonic lodge to which Mozart belonged, renowned as a hotbed of free-thinkers who debated the burning issues of late 18th-century Europe. The theatre director Peter Sellars has the same ambition for his own New Crowned Hope project which, minus the funny handshakes, kicked off in Vienna last autumn and arrived at the Barbican on Wednesday.

But by what stretch of the imagination do three piano concertos by Mozart, a few splodgy brushstrokes by painter Howard Hodgkin and choreography by Mark Morris amount to a gesture of political aspiration?

The composite Mozart Dances is certainly not the most obviously subversive item in the festival, whose programme over the next five weeks includes new films from South Africa, Iraq and Chad. Yet it succeeds in emphasising the humanity of these scores, exposing the melancholy dreams and wild desires simmering beneath their urbane surface.

The three concertos prompt a trio of dances, loosely linked. Eleven – set to the F major concerto No 11 – is cast mainly for the women in a thrusting, angular style that counters their floaty dresses. Double, by contrast, is danced by men (to the Sonata for Two Pianos), breaking down the guys' macho stance to render them soft and vulnerable.

Twenty-Seven (set to the very late Concerto No 27) becomes a joyful coming together, a contemporary marriage rite that shows Morris at his most bouncy and blithe. Yet I couldn't help feeling that the last thing that concerto's skippy rhythms needed was more skipping. For once, Morris's famous ability to translate sound directly into movement seemed obvious and trite; the piano playing of Emanuel Ax, hidden in the pit along with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields and conductor Jane Glover, is anything but. Unmannered, subtle and beautifully understated, it filters Mozart's sublime pianissimo passages through a golden haze of sound. Just sometimes, the choreography rises to match him: when the women stop still and peer up at the sky as if expecting some wonderful thing to fall from it, or when a row of three boys repeatedly toss one of their number from one end of the row to the other, a movement as deft as an arpeggio's crossing of hands.

Morris's dancers, once groundbreaking for the way they looked like people you might see on the street, are still predominantly chunky, the women especially. These days it's the men that look as if they need protecting, an impression Morris plays up in choreography that verges on the girlish, giving them steps more suited to sylphs and wilis.

It's meant to raise a smile, but it's also half-serious – Morris still battering away at prejudice, about the way we see ourselves and the way we behave toward each other.