Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House, London

Passion and precision

Modified since it was first announced, the Royal Ballet's Trilogy programme could have been retitled "English Choreographers", since it now gathers together Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor and Christopher Wheeldon. The latter, a 29-year-old Royal Ballet alumnus presently making waves in New York and elsewhere, contributes Tryst, the RB's only world premiere this season and his first large-scale piece for the company. And the scale is undeniably large, with five couples, led by Darcey Bussell and Jonathan Cope, and acorps de ballet of a dozen, who sweep across the stage's huge expanse. You can't miss them in their ultra-legible unison blocks and lines. Jean-Marc Puissant's designs are handsomely minimal: a framed rectangle at the back with colour changes; rectangular wings that lift to reveal Bussell and Cope for the long central pas de deux. Wheeldon's movement etches clean, uncluttered contours – streamlined classicism mixed with occasional brief quirks. There are strangely angled hands, for example, or, to close, the scattered cast silhouetted in profile, torsos undulating.

So is Wheeldon destined to join the pantheon of Tudor and Ashton? Not with Tryst, although he has a fistful of near-outstanding pieces to his name. His mistake is the score by James MacMillan, which gives the ballet its name. Sprawlingly eclectic, the music dominates all else, its components so vividly singular that they operate as pictures. The thin, caterwauling opening note is like a long scratch on a blackboard, followed by zigzagging arpeggios. Spidery filaments tingle, woven into a giant web; a swarm hums furiously; tinkling galactic glitter-dust sprinkles over a surface of deep chords.

The contrasts are too disparate for Wheeldon to shape them into cohesive sense. The design introduces occasional quasi-narrative events, such as the ray of white light that ends the Bussell-Cope adagio, the dancers watching as they would climatic phenomena. Wheeldon pulls out all the stops for Bussell and Cope in an attempt to inject an atmosphere of romantic mystery and to justify his title, the dancers lengthily separated from each other before eventually meeting. But these hinted ideas pull in opposite directions, unbridled by any semblance of internal logic.

The dancers look beautiful, if disinfected against any hint of grimy personality. The opposite is the case with Tudor's contrasted couples in The Leaves are Fading and with Ashton's Turgenev-inspired A Month in the Country. Sylvie Guillem returns as Natalia Petrovna and surpasses even herself. Her dancing, as flowing as liquid, as sharp as crystal, becomes a hypersensitive conductor for lightning fluctuations of emotion. She has always brought out the best in Jonathan Cope and as they coiled and drifted – passionately, erotically, hopelessly – they were totally caught up in each other. We held our breath, the minutes sped by, and then it all ended.