"Jewels has been an unequivocal and rapturous 'success'." So wrote Lincoln Kirstein in 1967 as he surveyed the triumph of his and Balanchine's New York City Ballet in this knock-out example of what he called one of Balanchine's "applause-machines".

On Friday night, Jewels entered the Royal Ballet repertory and the machine still generated applause, rapturous and (mostly) deserved. We see three plotless works. Emeralds is set to theatre music by Gabriel Fauré, Rubies is Balanchine's realisation of Stravinsky's 1929 Capriccio for piano and orchestra ; Diamonds uses the last four movements of Tchaikovsky's third symphony.