That Christopher Wheeldon is an innately musical choreographer is an accepted fact. His dances live in their music, grow from it, illuminate it. (That he can include in his Morphoses performances work as rabidly anti-musical as the Lightfoot/Leon Softly as I Leave You shows directorial generosity of an exceptional kind.)

The second Morphoses programme at last week’s end brought two pieces that exemplify Wheeldon’s response to his scores. Continuum is a dazzling realisation of Ligeti piano music for four couples. With insouciant ease Wheeldon fleshes out every device and compositional quirk in his score: we see the music, and Wheeldon shows it as fascinating in craft, witty, purposeful. For anyone seeking to know what Ligeti’s music is like, here is the perfect answer. And for anyone seeking to know what a ballerina is, I would propose the duet, late in the score, in which Wendy Whelan dances with intensity and inevitability, comparable to performances I have seen by great Noh theatre actors, their interpretations offering the distillation of a lifetime’s study and a centuries-old tradition of playing. Whelan’s concentration, her grace of gesture and movement, are a marvel, unforgettable, life-enhancing.

At the opposite pole , Wheeldon’s new Rhapsody Fantaisie is inspired by movements selected from Rakhmaninov’s two-piano suites. These lush scores are a musical flowering from the last years of imperial Petersburg, and Wheeldon’s response may best be understood as expressionistic, drenched with feeling. Six men and six women are dressed by Francisco Costa in blazing red, the women in short frocks, the men with bare chests above flaring harem-pants. Scenery consists of projections of innocuous line drawings by Hugo Dalton which peripherally invade the auditorium, Wheeldon’s choreography responds to the emotionalism and, I dare suggest, the period of the music’s creation, with a late-Romantic intensity that offers broad swathes of movement, densely weighted, and (I found) oppressive. I was reminded of the dances I saw, made in the 1960s, by the Russian choreographer Kasyan Goleizovsky, survivor of early Soviet experimentation, which suggested the same heady, unspecified psychic dramas. This Rhapsody tells of Wheeldon’s musical acuteness, but it is heavy on the palate.