Up until this week, the Bolshoi Ballet’s London season has presented the Moscow visitors on familiar ground – Le Corsaire, Bayadère, Spartacus, Don Quixote. But this triple bill landed the Bolshoi on unfamiliar territory, with a premiere from the British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and the acquisition of one of the most famous works by the American choreographer Twyla Tharp. The programme showed the Bolshoi, under Alexei Ratmansky’s inspired direction, reaching out beyond its comfort zone.

Yet the hit of this triple bill was an old Soviet ballet which the company hasn’t performed in decades. Created in the early 1960s, Class Concert is a gloriously romanticised version of the ballet class that dancers do every day. From exercises at the barre to displays of beauty and strength centre stage, Asaf Messerer’s shamelessly entertaining circus of a ballet zips through the most difficult combinations with glee and brings panache to the most basic.

The whole grand and thrilling show is immaculately staged by Mikhail Messerer, the choreographer’s nephew, and danced with sensational zest. The music, a compilation including Glazunov and Shostakovich, is an orgy of melody, played superbly by the Bolshoi Orchestra. The cast, including children (very sweet), was adorned by enormously appealing dancing from Svetlana Zakharova and Maria Alexandrova, but everyone danced as if this was the happiest night of their lives.

The change of mood in Wheeldon’s introspective new Elsinore – set to Arvo Pärt’s Third Symphony – couldn’t have been more drastic. An abstract work with a Hamlet theme, it’s filled with subdued emotional turmoil and a flurry of unsettling forces, which could be seen to represent some existential trauma. It shows Wheeldon thinking outside the Bolshoi box and some of his choreographic permutations are most unusual and compelling, but the ballet didn’t seem to be about these particular dancers, while Dmitri Gudanov’s muted role as a lone ghostly figure (Hamlet, presumably) came across as a wasted opportunity. And, despite fine performances by Gudanov and the four couples who surround him, Elsinore never made its point.

Tharp’s In the Upper Room (1986) has the same kind of full-on energy as Class Concert, although its classical-contemporary moves are framed like an aerobics workout. Some ballerinas wear flaming red pointe shoes, some wear soft jazz shoes. With Philip Glass’s propulsive music (recorded) driving them on, the 13-strong cast spin through a dizzying display of breakneck classicism and healthy athleticism. The cast, defined by the zany energy of Natalia Osipova as one of the gym babes, took to the ballet’s sporty enthusiasm with a sense of triumph. Not surprising, really, since the entire company seems to be on a tremendous high.

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