With Chroma and Infra under his belt, the challenge for Wayne McGregor, the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer, is to keep the hits coming. The good news is that Limen, his latest premiere, finds him elongating and enriching his vocabulary in the company of Covent Garden’s wonderfully accomplished dancers (the casting is a luxury beyond belief). The less good news is that Limen lacks the dynamic buzz and thematic punchline of its predecessors.

This is not to damn it as a failure — far from it. Limen is less disorientating than previous McGregor creations, yet still trades in unsettled, dislocated and hurried energies, qualities it shares with its luscious music, Notes on Light, a cello concerto by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. The score, drenched in eddies of dark emotion that soar into the sparest of lines, is beautifully realised by Barry Wordsworth, the ROH Orchestra and the solo cellist Anssi Karttunen, for whom the work was composed.

In his programme note, McGregor says he was interested in the idea of liminality, the thresholds of darkness and light, presence and absence, life and death. They are less manifest in the choreography than in the overall look of the piece, which owes much to Tatsuo Miyajima’s set. It combines a scrim of floating numbers at the start and a huge wall of blue LED lights that subsume the dancers at the end.

The ballet’s real shape and purpose reside in its duets; most notably, the one for Eric Underwood and Sarah Lamb, in which the dance resonates with unmistakeable sexual attraction.

Limen is part of a triple bill that also welcomes back George Balanchine’s Agon and introduces Covent Garden to Glen Tetley’s Sphinx. The former is a wondrous blend of athleticism and astringent purification. It was made in 1957, to a commissioned score from Stravinsky, and is as masterful and mesmerising as ever. In this performance, Mara Galeazzi had sparkle, but elsewhere some of the work’s forceful clean lines were fudged, the ending was botched and the music (conducted by Daniel Capps) was sluggish.

Agon’s electrifying duet was danced on opening night by Carlos Acosta and Melissa Hamilton. She has sex appeal and bendy physicality; Acosta’s credentials as a charismatic hunk are long established. Their feisty erotic tussle was the highlight, though a little more sensual exploration would not go amiss.

Bringing Sphinx into the Royal Ballet repertoire is an odd decision. Tetley’s 1977 creation is a period piece from a not particularly fascinating period, a plodding work relying on myth, symbols (represented by Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s silver winged sculpture) and an overarching lyrical angst. Still, the music, Martinu’s Double Concerto, is lush and Marianela Nuñez’s title performance is utterly alluring. Drawn by her passion for Oedipus, a desire that will lead to her death, Nuñez’s Sphinx is a powerhouse of unleashed emotion in every gorgeous limb. As Oedipus, Rupert Pennefather has a velvet touch that acts as a springboard to her doomed romantic rapture.

Box office: 020-7304 4000, to Nov 18

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