Photo: Tristram Kenton

@ Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat Nov 28 2015

Rambert is frequently at the cutting edge of dance, its repertoire regularly augmented by new work. It is always a pleasure to see such real commitment not just to choreographers, but also to composers and designers, their ideas realised by some of the best performers around. Rambert also understands the importance of live music, sadly one of the first things to go in these days of continuing cuts, and all the music is performed live in their Festival Theatre programme. It is particularly exciting to find the 18-time Scottish Championship Brass Band winner Whitburn Band on stage tonight.

Writing well for brass band is not an easy thing to do, but Gavin Higgins’ often technically challenging score for Dark Arteries is masterly, teasing out the most from the band’s forces without fighting them. Whitburn Band are certainly well up to the task, producing an amazing sound including some beautiful solos, those by principal cornet player Chris Bradley particularly noteworthy.

However, it is in many ways the power of the music and what it so clearly evokes that stops the work being entirely cohesive. The music is redolent of the violent end of the British mining era—a memory still so very raw for so very many. For much of the time Mark Baldwin’s choreography, although polished and very beautiful in itself, cannot compete with such connotational overload. However, when at times music and dance do genuinely mesh together, for example during the work’s incredibly poignant ending, it proves to be very moving indeed.

Choreographer Didy Velman’s The 3 Dancers provides a nicely balanced contrast to Dark Arteries. Inspired by Picasso’s in some ways still enigmatic work of the same name, it is very much about shadow and light and the form and energy of Picasso’s work, rather than any narrative thought to underlie it. Set and lighting design are highly effective here, acting as a canvas for the gradual intermingling of contrasting black and white forms that successfully realise the implied temporal dynamics of Cubist art.

It is a measure of Rambert’s confidence that it ends its programme not with an upbeat, “fun” work, which is almost de rigueur especially in a touring programme, but instead with the emotionally concentrated Transfigured Night choreographed by Kim BrandstrupSchoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, on which the choreography is based, is chock-full of late German romantic influences and remains utterly intense from beginning to end. The dance forms three narratives—three duets—alternative outcomes catalysed by the same revelation of infidelity, accompanied by a “chorus” of sixteen dancers. The passion of the dancing is a real match for the power of the music, a fusion that has the creative energy to stun an audience.

This is exactly what one expects from Rambert: a programme that does not compromise backed by real artistic vision and performed by dancers of the highest calibre.