Review: Ballet Nights – The New Year’s Day Concert with dancers, musicians and opera singers “of an incredible standard”
Lily Hyde sees Ballet Nights’ New Year’s Day Concert and finds some very strange artistic choices, though enjoys several dazzling performances.
| Title | The New Year’s Day Concert |
| Company | Ballet Nights |
| Venue | Cadogan Hall, London |
| Date | 1 January 2026 |
| Reviewer | Lily Hyde |
Since its inception in 2023, Ballet Nights has produced 11 programmes, which have been performed both in the UK and abroad. Ahead of its first tour later this year, Thursday saw Cadogan Hall play host to Ballet Night’s inaugural New Year’s Day Concert, with a programme offering a mixture of classical ballet, live music, and boundary-breaking dance. Unfortunately, it seemed to bite off more than it could chew.
The quality of the dancing was consistently strong. English National Ballet‘s Minju Kang and Lorenzo Trossello, along with Northern Ballet‘s Kevin Poeung, reprised their performance of Kenneth Tindall’s This Bitter Earth, which they danced at the British Ballet Charity Gala in 2021, bringing a quiet despondency to their flowing movements and dancing with incredible cohesion. Florent Melac’s Moonlight, danced by English National Ballet’s Gareth Haw and London City Ballet‘s Constance Devernay-Laurence, had a lovely sinuous quality, and the choreographic duo Ekleido brought an impressive synchronicity to their piece, Clinquant, engaging with the small stage in a dynamic and mercurial way.
The performances that worked best were the ones that were easily contained to a small space – Birmingham Royal Ballet Soloist Yasiel Hodelín Bello brought energy, astounding jumps, and incredible technical flair to the solos he danced from Le Corsaire and Don Quixote, but he could have probably covered twice the width of the stage, and watching him being forced to restrain his dancing whilst listening to Adams’s and Minkus’s iconic scores play on a tinny speaker, one can’t help but feel slightly shortchanged.
There were similar issues plaguing Sebastien Bertaud’s Evanescence, danced by Wiener Staatsballett Principal Liudmila Konovalova, in which she had to adapt her movements to navigate cables and microphones, undermining any potential weight the piece might have had, despite her exquisite fluidity of movement.
The music throughout the evening was excellent, and Dominic Stokes playing Paul Hindemith’s Viola Sonata Op. 25, No.1 was fantastic, but as much as branding the event as a concert rather than a straight ballet gala allows the organisers some leeway, opening the show with Quartet Concrète and Ballet Nights’s resident pianist, Erik Viktor Emanuel, playing two of Dvořák’s piano quintets, felt more like the runtime needed padding than an extended overture.
The undoubted highlight of the evening came from the artist who made the best use of Cadogan Hall’s stage – Baritone Patrick Alexander Keefe in his rendition of Largo al factotum from Il barbiere di Siviglia. Stumbling onto the stage in an askew party hat, Keefe immediately cemented his status as an opera star of tomorrow, commanding the stage and dazzling the audience.
Even with the venue’s acoustics working against him, Keefe’s voice was rich and full, with exquisite diction and breath control. So comfortable was he in his quality and technique that he could be playful, perching on the edge of the stage and harassing the quartet playing an adapted score (beautifully arranged by Dominic Stokes), he rightfully brought the house down. A last-minute addition to the programme, as thrilling as it was to watch, its late arrival feeds into what I consider to be a bigger problem with the evening: a general lack of confidence in the programming.
This mostly manifested itself in some very strange artistic choices. Chopin’s Étude in C Sharp Minor, Op. 10, No.4 was accompanied by a sequence of flashing red lights, as if a piece also known as ‘Torrent’ lacked sufficient dynamism to entertain an audience for two minutes. Florent Melac’s Moonlight was obscured almost entirely by dry ice, and Evanescence had Konovalova cast into shadow, but Soprano Gulshan Akin was harshly lit.
There also seemed to be a disconnect between what Ballet Nights is and what the audience who comes to Ballet Nights expects. The evening was hosted by Ballet Night’s founder and CEO, Jamiel Devernay-Laurence, whose compèring skills would be better suited to wrestling or Capital Radio than Cadogan Hall. Devernay-Laurence, often smarmy but always grating, regularly encouraged the audience to cheer and whoop, leaving pauses after name-dropping various celebrities within the ballet world, like Carlos Acosta and Matthew Ball, but either the audience was new to ballet and didn’t know who Carlos Acosta was, or they did, but weren’t the whooping kind. Furthermore, introducing the opening two numbers of the programme as ‘two bangers from Dvořák’ somewhat undermines the tone of an evening for which some tickets cost as much as £160.
I would like to stress that all of the artists who performed, be they dancers, musicians or opera singers, were of an incredible standard, and I’m grateful that the evening introduced artists like Yasiel Hodelín Bello and Patrick Alexander Keefe, whose careers I will follow with interest. But nothing about Ballet Nights’s format would encourage me to seek out these artists in anything other than a ballet or opera.
The evening’s grand finale, the pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty, was the perfect summation of the evening’s shortcomings. Scaled down to fit the Cadogan Hall stage, most of the lifts were replaced with ill-fitting choreography that did not fit the music. Danced by Liudmila Konovalova and Gareth Haw, it was, at moments, stilted, awkward, and lacked a meaningful connection between the leads that a regular ballet company would work for months, if not years, to achieve. Ballet Nights’ endeavour to celebrate and showcase ballet is entirely noble, but its format means that it is incapable of doing so in an elevated way. Still, if the applause at the end was anything to go by, a lot of the audience left very happy, and the Ballet Nights team have a good 363 days to perfect 2027’s concert.
