Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House, London

One minute they're ignoring each other, the next, swooning

Late programme changes suggest a certain jitteriness, but none was in evidence by the time the curtain went up on Ross Stretton's final triple bill of the season. This has been his first as artistic director of the Royal Ballet, and one that even his meanest critics grudgingly agree has been a quiet but steady success. Even the programme change happened for all the right reasons, the middle item replaced by a more simply designed ballet to facilitate the staging of Christopher Wheeldon's new work Tryst. As the Royal's only world premiere this year, Tryst had a lot riding on it.

So too has its 29-year-old creator, an ex-RB dancer whose star as a choreographer has risen dramatically since he left for New York City Ballet.

Wheeldon has made miniatures on the RB's dancers before (including the silky Pavane which became a big hit for Darcey Bussell), but this is his first shot at large-scale, and Tryst is as big as plotless one-act ballets get. Five leading couples and a corps of 12 sweep impressively across a wide, open-sided stage. Even the Stonehenge-like wings, in Jean-Marc Puissant's clean design, levitate obligingly to clear the dancers' exits.

The motor of Wheeldon's imagination is James MacMillan's score of the same title, the orchestral tour de force that established the signature elements of his writing back in 1989. Five distinct sections span five sharply defined modes, from the brassy, action-packed challenge of the outer sections, through soft, Celtic wistfulness, and an iridescent central section for strings, when deep, perfect-interval harmonies seem to tug at some dim blood memory of a distant past. Wheeldon duly gilds his own mainly classical language with movement motifs hinting at ancient civilisations – the angled arms of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the flattened profiles of old Greece.

MacMillan's Stravinsky-like rhythms propel the corps de ballet thrillingly, but the notion of a lovers' tryst doesn't appear until the big pas de deux, and even then Darcey Bussell and Jonathan Cope spend the first several minutes ignoring one another. Bussell is absorbed by the languid folding and unfolding of her own newly whippet-like upper body, which since her return from maternity leave seems to have developed subtle points of flexion and articulation most dancers don't know exist. When the pair do engage, Wheeldon comes up with arresting Kama Sutra twists – Bussell in 180-degree splits across Cope's lap, or a backward swoon supported by one hand and the crook of his knees.

Yet the effect, as of the work as a whole, is far from flash – more one of cool abstraction, rooted in the practices of far-off pre-history. When a strip of white light appears on the projected horizon, and the corps gathers round to watch, it gradually transpires that the tryst in question is a meeting with some phenomenon of nature, not just man and woman – a subtle shift, skilfully worked.

Antony Tudor's The Leaves Are Fading, made for American Ballet Theater in 1975 but new to Covent Garden this year, is anything but impersonal. I don't happen to go for the faded lyricism that links its five romantic duets, intended to show the progression of love from shy flirting to – well, apparently to something rather problematic – but that's more to with a personal low-threshold for soppiness than a critique of the steps, which are as inventive and fresh as one could wish, albeit within conventional bounds.

Illicit love, and its bitter fallout, inspires a more biting drama in Frederick Ashton's A Month in the Country, which I can never see often enough now that Sylvie Guillem has commandeered the role of Natalya, the married woman who falls for her ward's tutor. Oh, the folly of infatuated middle youth. And oh, the genius of Ashton, who saw fit to mesh Turgenev's scenario with the sighs of Chopin's Andante Spianato to lay the fibrillations of a deceiving heart so painfully bare.

'Tryst' returns to the Royal Ballet repertory in October

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk