Anthony Dowell Celebration, Royal Opera House, London

A dazzling farewell

Here, finally, is the last of the long series of tributes to Anthony Dowell on his retirement from the Royal Ballet. No pre-vious director ever had so protracted a send-off, although Frederick Ashton went in a greater blaze of love and glory. And it was Ashton who gloriously provided most of this Dowell celebration, made up of works associated with him.

The climax was A Month In The Country. Like some of Ashton's other ballets, this looks better the more you see it. The dances increasingly reveal the inventiveness of their limpid fluency, the clarity of the story-telling becomes more striking. Created 25 years ago for Lynn Seymour and Dowell, it is now danced eloquently well by a cast headed by Sylvie Guillem with a new partner, Massimo Murru.

Guillem has the ability to convey every nuance of mood by a tiny gesture or a subtle variation of facial expression, as well as by the vivid inflections of her dancing. Only one complaint: with her 1850 frock, bare legs look wrong; she really ought to wear tights for this role, however much she dislikes them. On this occasion she is closely rivalled for exactness of step and purposeful acting by Alina Cojocaru, making her début as the young ward, Vera.

Murru, an unexpected guest from La Scala, Milan, brings an attractive gaucheness to the role of the young tutor, making credible both his appeal to the other characters and his unintended habit of causing them disaster. David Drew and Christopher Saunders are exactly right, too, as the heroine's bumbling husband and her dull ad-mirer. All the characters seem to speak to each other through the dance, completely conveying the essence of Turgenev's five-act play in 45 minutes of movement.

The programme begins with another Ashton ballet, The Dream with Johan Kobborg and Leanne Benjamin repeating the success they enjoyed only a couple of months back. A less happy choice is the handful of snippets that comes between the two main ballets. The "Awakening" duet from the 1968 production of The Sleeping Beauty is a very minor example of Ashton, and anyway Belinda Hatley and Robert Parker are sabotaged in it by an odd reinterpretation of Lila de Nobili's costumes.

More Ashton in the white Monotones trio (why do we never see its green companion piece?), not cast or danced with enough regard for its classical style. An unimpassioned account of the Manon seduction duet, on the other hand, concentrates too much on steps and line – not the strongest features of MacMillan's choreography.

The Don Quixote showpiece offers a taste of real bravura, even if here Carlos Acosta seemed to hold back slightly in his solo, then came a cropper landing from one of his amazing dare-devil leaps in the finale. But Tamara Rojo looks her best dancing with him, and her performance was dazzling throughout. Technique, speed, style and charm – she has them all.

Ends tomorrow (020-7304 4000)