Cathy Marston has previously been an Associate Artist of the Royal Opera House and Director of Bern Ballett, and is much in demand internationally. The inspiration for her first work for The Royal Ballet Main Stage is the momentous life and career of the cellist Jacqueline du Pré. Jerome Robbins’s elegant and elegiac classic forms the second part of the programme. This exercise in pure dance for five couples, set to music by Chopin, is a masterpiece of subtlety and invention.

A modern Mexican classic of magic realism provides the basis for The Royal Ballet’s new full-length work, reuniting Artistic Associate Christopher Wheeldon with the creative team who transformed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Winter’s Tale into dance, composer Joby Talbot and designer Bob Crowley. Journey into Laura Esquivel’s captivating family saga where the central character’s emotions spill out through cooking to influence everyone around her in startling and dramatic ways. In this co-production with American Ballet Theatre, Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra acts as musical consultant for Talbot’s newly commissioned score, with Wheeldon working closely with Esquivel to reshape her richly layered story as an entertaining and engrossing new ballet.