It is a pleasure to welcome the San Francisco Ballet back to London. Or rather, in the light of events on Monday night, two-thirds of a pleasure. The company knows that serious choreography is the first requirement for a troupe's future and director Helgi Tomasson has made an honourable choice of Balanchine works and creations concerned with the ennobling power of classicism.

So this programme brought Balanchine's "Square Dance", where baroque string-writing (Vivaldi, Corelli) sustains dance that persuades social jovialities to put on more elegant dress. There results a joyful work with, at its heart, Balanchine's beautiful portrait of a male dancer. This solo, admirably done by the Cuban danseurJoan Boada, is a balletic prince brought to the New World and freed of pomp but not of dignity. It is a marvel. Marvellous, too, Christopher Wheeldon's "Continuum", in which he considers, with extraordinary sympathy, Gyorgy Ligeti piano music. Four couples explore rhythms and aphoristic sonorities, absolutely attuned to dance and score. I must salute the Klee-like way that the elegant Katita Waldo takes a line for a walk, and hail the duet for Muriel Maffre and Yury Posokhov, who are grown-ups in a grown-up situation, and wonderful. And so to the suicide-attempt that closed the evening. For inscrutable reasons SFB asked Alexey Ratmansky (now director of the Bolshoi Ballet) to realise Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals". Lumpen dance; the musical wit of an enraged rhino, loathsome costuming, and a feeling that this was intended to show how silly ballet could be, made for something repulsive that was greeted with peals of merry laughter (especially when Fokine's Swan was mauled). To Hell with it. Admirable playing from the English Chamber Orchestra under Andrew Mogrelia, and the Ligeti pianist Michael McGraw. Tel 0870 737 7737