'Wuthering Heights' reviews recent NBT reviews 'Concert Fantasy' reviews 'Fancy Free' reviews 'Western Symphony' reviews recent BRB reviews more Jeffery Taylor reviews Web version held on Ballet.co by kind permission of Jeffery Taylor and the Sunday Express Express Website

Look at the two new season openers recently on offer like Northern Ballet Theatre's new version of local legend, 'Wuthering Heights', which opened its winter tour in Bradford. It's a cracker.

For years the Yorkshire based company has been mired in costly stage effects and cute takes on tradition relegating the dancers to clothes pegs. Choreographer and new artistic director, David Nixon, has now reversed the process. With Ali Allen's minimal scenery, pictorial music by Claude-Michel Les Miserables, Schonberg, principal dancers Jonathan Ollivier (Heathcliff) and Charlotte Talbot (Cathy) make mincemeat of our emotions, which is just as it should be.

The familiar story is simply told, how orphan Heathcliff and Cathy's romance is spoiled by Cathy's preference for local toff, Edgar (Hironao Takahashi); she breaks Heathcliff's heart and dies when he breaks hers a simple tale of country folk that clearly pressed all the right buttons for Bradford folk. Nixon really gets his teeth into Act 2 with a series of duets charting the disintegrating relationships between Talbot's Cathy, her husband and her leather clad Heathcliff. Talbot's grunts with Heathcliff are much more fun than her marital simpers and coupled with Ollivier's powerful personality make a riveting evening.

Meanwhile Birmingham Royal Ballet's class act opened with director David Bintley's new 'Concert Fantasy'. Bintley is simply a master at sculpting severely classical steps into a living 3-dimensional confection you can roll around on your tongue. Backed by girls in dinner plates and diamonds, male principal dancer Chi Cao leads the parade to Tchaikovsky's music with a relaxed grandeur so simply perfect you just can't help smiling.

The increasingly exquisite fuchsia-clad Rachel Peppin is amused and aroused by sailor Robert Parker's boyish charm as he goes on the town with two mates in 'Fancy Free'. US choreographer Jerome Robbins gives the lads Donald O'Connor knock about routines to snare a girl, including a jumped double turn in the air landing in the splits definitely not one to try at home. Robbins's 1944 collaboration with composer Leonard Bernstein grew into the stage and film hit On The Town, and shipmates Parker, Michael Revie and James Grundy have a way to go before competing with Sinatra, Kelly and Munshin, but they are clearly having a helluva time trying.

Russian-born US choreographer George Balanchine had a lot of fun combining his Imperial Russian Ballet training with the zesty athletic American dance style and his 1954 'Western Symphony' is a dazzling culture clash. Be-feathered bar girls and Stetsoned cowpokes dance choreography on the grand scale to traditional thumpy settler music. Gun fights and do-se-do-ing, swing your partners and rope a well. you ve got the picture. The ballet is a romp with quality, and though little seen outside American companies, sits well on BRB. If these two companies are anything to go by, Britain faces a winter of very contented dance lovers.