Light of Passage, Royal Ballet review - Crystal Pite’s cosmic triptych powers back

“Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the good prevail”. The refrain of Aeschylus’s chorus near the start of the Oresteia is alive and honoured in Henryk Górecki’s rhetoric-free symphonic memorial and Crystal Pite’s response to the dynamism under its seemingly static surface. 44 dancers of all ages, soprano, orchestra and design all work towards a timeless work of art, resonating now but bound to hold up in whatever future remains to us.

A confession first: until last night, I’d never heard the Polish composer’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, his Third, in a live performance. The media circus around the 1977 work’s rediscovery in the 1990s, and what little I’ve heard suggesting it was proto-Glass or Max Richter blandness, heavy with what another composer dismissed as “instant spiritual highs”, deafened me to its truth. Like the works of Arvo Pärt, this is music lit, or shadowed, from within, placing major or minor chords at crucial points, following its own unassailable trajectory in setting three poems of loss involving parents and children. The longest of the three slow movements, the half-hour first, takes us from the depths of the strings to an ever-thickening move towards the light, enfolding a 15th century Polish lament of the Virgin for her Son before retreating almost palindromically to its starting point. Pite, it’s clear from the start, is not going to mirror its slow trajectory, but fills the stage with patterns of dancers bending, reaching upwards, folding and flowing, blocking the path only miraculously to allow a way forward in intense rituals of exile, finding illumination and losing it. One couple, danced by Kristen McNally and Marcelino Sambé, intensifies the sense of bereavement and despair: as the music inexorably fades, Sambé's figure (pictured above) rails against the dying of the light.

This was Pite’s first offering, as Flight Pattern, in 2017, prompted by the refugee crisis. Although she was already working in perfect harmony with the design team – husband Jay Gower Taylor, Nancy Bryant and Tom Visser – it’s hard to imagine what is now the first “act” standing by itself. The result is spellbinding, but kept me, at least, emotionally at arm’s length, perhaps because the essence of families leaving their homeland represents the component of children with symbolic blankets, a gesture that doesn't read at first. The payoff comes when we see a playful, jumping boy dressed in white (Teddy Holten-France, pictured above) at the beginning of “Covenant” after the interval. Pite mirrors Górecki’s swift move from bright major to mournful minor as 18 black-clad adults manipulate a group of children, as others join the boy, in fluid moves from support to obstruction and finally release. This is Pite’s Purgatory in a parallel with Dante, a deeply moving meditation on articles from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Her Paradise is bittersweet; touching on Orpheus’s journey to Hades and – here – the Elysian fields to try and regain his Eurydice, Isidora Barbara Joseph seeks her fellow dancer from the Company of Elders, Christopher Havell. Infinitely more nuanced and evocative than the weak final part of The Dante Project, where Wayne McGregor and Thomas Adès serve up a pallid, repetitive view of heaven, Pite perfectly reflects the shift from Górecki’s play on two of the most melancholy chords in music, at the start and end of Chopin’s tonally radical A minor Mazurka, Op. 17 No. 4, to radiance and back.

Soprano Francesca Chiejina (pictured left by Dola Posh), a success story of the house's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme, is incandescent throughout, a lyric-dramatic voice bringing more weight than the equally expressive Dawn Upshaw on the classic Nonesuch recording that sold millions. Maybe the moving texts, the last a Silesian lament by a mother for her son, following the second movement's message from a daughter imprisoned by the Gestapo, should have been included in the programme, if not supertitled above the dancers. But that's a small quibble. It’s also good to be able to watch conductor Zoe Tsokanou’s sympathetic urging of the Royal Ballet Orchestra. There's no weak link at any point; at the same time as the Royal Opera has a hit on its hands with Turnage’s discombobulating Festen, its companion company consolidates a masterpiece.

• Light of Passage at the Royal Opera House until 12 March
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