Dutch National Ballet performs fairytale ballets just like anyone else. But abroad the company is more famous for its sleek and elegant abstraction. The programme it now brings to London, including work by some of the 20th century’s most important choreographers, shows how far non-narrative ballet can go.

Rudi van Dantzig, the most significant figure in the company’s history, made Four Last Songs in 1977, and if it looks passé now, that’s only because it spawned so many imitations. Van Dantzig’s response to Strauss’s elegiac masterpiece (movingly sung by Camellia Johnson, but patchily played by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia) is to equate the end of life with the end of a relationship. Consequently four couples (one for each song) dance an emotional journey from rapture to resignation, while a silken angel of death hovers like an inevitable consequence.

Van Dantzig’s plangent style, built of long, emotion-soaked phrases, gushes lyricism as if straining to contain the richness of Strauss. The uplift in the choreography, the stretch, the weight, illustrate every painful moment of separation. This is as close to pure feeling as you can get in dance, and the company performs it with the respect it deserves.

The other DNB giant is Hans van Manen. There are 40 of his ballets in the repertoire; London sees one of the newest, Frank Bridge Variations (2005), set to Britten. This work is not on pointe (unlike the other ballets) but it demands a superbly tuned classical technique. Van Manen’s shapes are strong and sharp, etched with dazzling clarity, while the movement embraces a mélange of moods — taut and flowing, energetic and serene. Like the music it travels a reductive arc, becoming more and more essential as it goes on.

Special to London is the world premiere of Suite for Two, set to a Bach cello suite and choreographed by Krzysztof Pastor, now a resident choreographer. Ruta Jezerskyte and Cédric Ygnace do their best with the choreography’s stark variations and the interplay with the onstage cellist (Quirine Viersen), but there’s a limit to how far you can take such colourless writing.

William Forsythe made The Second Detail for the National Ballet of Canada in 1991, but it’s perfect for the Dutch. The ballet, for 13 dancers, uses Thom Willems’s driving electronic rhythms to push classicism to extremes. Speed and daring, turned-in distortions, off-kilter balances, lashing spidery limbs: Forsythe does everything to pull ballet off its perch while keeping every corner of the excellent ensemble thriving. Design (also Forsythe) is gorgeous, a radiant study in grey, lit beautifully. Having suffered through his newest work at the Wells last month, it’s heartening to be reminded of Forsythe’s incredible talent.

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