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The big draw of the evening was Christopher Wheeldon's first new work for the company, and though I wouldn't describe it as Hot it was certainly much warmer than some of the pieces we've seen from him lately. It was framed by Nacho Duato's Coming Together, dating from 1991, and one of Ohad Naharin's compilation pieces, this one called Minus 7: neither of them new or fresh enough to count as Hot, either. Let's hope the title at least sold a few tickets. The Duato is set to a score by the American composer Frederic Rzewski, inspired by a letter written by political activist Sam Melville, who was killed in the Attica Prison riots in 1971; extracts from the letter, fragmented and constantly repeated, are spoken over the minimalist music. However you only need to know this to save you going crazy wondering what the words are about, as Duato takes his inspiration from the form of the music and more or less ignores its literary content. It's an athletic tour de force, hard work for the dancers by the looks of it, but so far as I was concerned it was a pointless and unsatisfying exercise.

Naharin no longer makes new dance except for his own Batsheva Dance Company: the best other groups can hope for is a remix of extracts from his existing works. He believes that 'There are no new concepts. Everything has already been done.' but apparently finds deep fascination in reorganising and reordering. So, if you've seen Minus 16 you've already seen two of the big set-pieces in Minus 7, and if you go to his Deca Dance in Edinburgh this summer, you'll almost certainly see them again. The one with the circle of chairs (originally from Anaphaza) and the one where people from the audience are persuaded on to the stage (from Zachacha) are quite entertaining the first time round, but they really don't bear constant repetition. I did enjoy a pas de deux to Vivaldi's Stabat Mater, finely danced by Cedric Lambrette and his partner (Anastasia Paschali, perhaps) though, and best of all was a brilliant solo by Morton Eggert. Starting in the middle of the interval, he held the stage entirely alone for getting on for 20 minutes, dancing (partly or mostly improvised, I assume) to Latin American rhythms. He's funny and clever and a very good dancer - he'd already looked spectacular in the Duato piece - but above all he's an entertainer. Trying to think of someone else who could hold an audience like this, the only name I could come up with was Simon Keenlyside - he's that good.

Fortunately, Wheeldon's new piece more than made up for the shortcomings of the rest of the evening. It's set to Gavin Bryars' second String Quartet, The Wanderers, and shares its title, and a factual description would make it sound like a straightforward, if slightly unusually structured, plotless ballet: solo, pas de deux, trio, two more pas de deux, finale for the whole cast. Even at that level it would be a beautiful and engrossing work, but the performance I saw was much more than that. The two leads, Silja Schandorff and Kenneth Greve, have for years been the company's starriest partnership, and this was their last ever performance together: the whole ballet carried an intense feeling of loss and regret. Greve, two days away from the end of his dancing career, seemed already at a slight distance; Schandorff looked as if his departure was casting a long shadow over the year she has left before her own compulsory retirement. Her dancing is so lovely - it's hard to accept that it will be over so soon.

She and Greve have two long pas de deux; their autumnal feel is constrasted with the fast, brilliant trio done by Diana Cuni, Thomas Lund and Tim Matiakis (all of them near the peak of their performing careers) and a charming pas de deux for Femke Slot and Ulrik Birkkjaer, the two most recently promoted soloists. On this occasion it was easy to read these as Schandorff's memories or as a look at the past, present and future of the company: I don't know how the ballet will look when it reappears in later seasons, but what I am sure of is that it will never be more perfectly cast, or bring its audience so close to tears.