This week Carlos Acosta is back home in Havana, where he is leading the Royal Ballet on its first visit to Cuba. Just 72 hours earlier he had been ensconced at the Lowry as the major dance attraction of the Manchester International Festival.

Salford audiences were lucky to see him sail through two of his finest roles: Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun and George Balanchine’s Apollo. Acosta has long since illustrated that he is one of this generation’s finest Apollos. Here, alas, his three Muses couldn’t match his passionate sense of commitment. Happily, that wasn’t the case with Faun. The languorous sensualities of Robbins’s ballet revolve around a pair of dancers who meet in a ballet studio. Their brief encounter is as erotic as it is innocent. Begoña Cao proved the perfect partner for Acosta in this daydream of love.

The other items on the bill failed to match up. Acosta was taking his first crack at Robbins’s Suite of Dances. While this could become one of his signature pieces, it is clear that he has yet to grab its true measure. Dressed in red, he began seated at the feet of the cellist Natalie Clein. After a plethora of dance invention, he capped his performance with a cartwheel that brought him back to her feet. Acosta has the technical facility and the intrinsic charm to make these playful solos to Bach sparkle, but in order to do that he will have to find the offhand nonchalance that Robbins conjured when he created the piece for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1994.

The choreographer Adam Hougland arrived with impressive North American credentials, but his duet Young Apollo failed to generate much of an impression. Not only is his choreography obvious, his dancers, Anaïs Chalendard and Junor de Oliveria Souza, didn’t send sparks flying. Even when her legs were wrapped around his waist, the two failed to gel. She was too self-focused; he wasn’t focused enough.

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