Michael Corder’s choreographic career has been prolific and international, but fundamentally he is an organic product of the Royal Ballet. They performed his first work while he was still at the school as a dancer. As a classicist through and through, and one of eclectic musical sensitivity, he holds a place in a distinguished line of home-grown stylists.

Last week, at Covent Garden, the Royal Ballet revived his beautiful 1982 work L’Invitation au Voyage for the first time in 23 years. It is so polished and atmospheric a creation, you feel it should have returned before now.

Corder’s music is five orchestral songs by the 19th-century French composer Henri Duparc, settings of poems by Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Gautier and Robert de Bonnières. These reflections on love and loss are focused on the singer herself, who presides over the on-stage action, weaving through the dancers as if conjuring up phantoms. Harriet Williams is the fine mezzo-soprano for this revival; draped in a gown, she looks like a classical goddess.

Yolanda Sonnabend’s art-nouveau designs of gilded columns vanishing into impressionist clouds set us in a magical pavilion, against a sky that turns from stormy to rose-tinged, and Paul Pyant’s lighting is magical, too. It is a dream world: the costumes suggest a mythological arcadia; there are gestures resembling the casting of spells — an enigmatic air hangs over everything.

Corder’s dances flow lusciously and create beautiful shapes, from the opening romantic pas de deux for Marianela Nuñez and young Sergei Polunin to the moodier duets of Leanne Benjamin and Federico Bonelli. Benjamin’s elegance and gravitas are an anchor; Bonelli is a martial hero. This pair, with Mellissa Hamilton and Edward Watson, intertwine in a double duet to the title song, before all these dream people fade away to the tinkling of a harp.

This ballet’s quality holds its own, even on a programme with two great works to Tchaikovsky by Balanchine. The sublimities of Serenade, a timeless manifestation of genius, are so stunning in their inspirational “rightness” to the music that you catch your breath at every incident and evolution. The RB at its best dances the work matchlessly; the ensemble of women at last Tuesday’s performance was immaculate and the five principals magnificent — Nuñez especially haunting, with Lauren Cuthbertson, Mara Galeazzi, Rupert Pennefather and Valeri Hristov. This is an apt moment to mention that Cuthbertson and Pennefather are newly promoted principals — and both are home-grown, which is all the more notable among the ranks from other nations. Two of the most admired internationals, Tamara Rojo and Bonelli, dazzled virtuosically in the grand Theme and Variations, which closed an entirely luxurious evening with the Royal Ballet.

While Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet about love and corruption, Manon, is continuing its latest run at the Opera House, it is simultaneously viewable on a regional tour by English National Ballet in a company-premiere season that opened at the Bristol Hippodrome. The choreography is the same as the RB’s, but the staging has a very different look, in sparer, more tourable settings by Mia Stensgaard. This production is on hire from the Royal Danish Ballet.

Unlike the heavy red-gold of Nicholas Georgiadis’s RB original, the colour tones are monochromatic: black, white, dove grey. The decors allow a greater sense of space, but you lose the feel of a sexual hothouse. I liked the black, looming prow of a ship in the New Orleans scene, but a stage bare of anything but dry ice for the swamp of death is hardly as effective as Covent Garden’s wall of fronds and creepers.

ENB’s dancing at the two performances I saw was mostly strong. Agnes Oaks and Thomas Edur, the Estonian husband-and-wife star couple, seized their new roles of Manon and Des Grieux with fervour and finesse — powerful dancing, splendid emotional conviction. Erina Takahashi brought delicacy and spirit to a matinée Manon, looking frighteningly broken in degradation; the young first artist Esteban Berlanga was her ardent lover. Both Dmitri Gruzdyev and Arionel Vargas were excellent as the pimping Lescaut. Behind his white face with scarlet-bow lips, Andre Portasio was arrogantly effective as Monsieur GM. But why the Gaoler should also have ghostly white make-up like a mask defeats me. This is hardly the place for a figure out of Chinese opera.

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