THE opening production of Northern Ballet’s new season comes and goes all too quickly in a week.

Don’t delay; book tickets now, because this is the most beautiful, heartbreaking piece of classical dance artistic director David Nixon has brought to Leeds.

It is the only full-length ballet the Canadian choreographer has created with another company: the Ballet du Rhin in Mulhouse, France, in 2005, whose premiere fused a contemporary method with Nixon’s classical background.

This British premiere reassembles the 2005 French production team – costume and set designer Jerome Kaplan, projection designer Tanguy Alanou and light designer Olivier Oudiou – to go with Hans Werner Henze’s stirring music.

The opening is breathtaking: silence accompanying the sea’s endless dance, represented by the ensemble of sea maidens in hooped dresses that swish as they brush the surface.

Kaplan’s nautical motif is a delight throughout, from beach hillocks to fishermen’s attire to a boat afloat, and even when Tobias Batley’s love-torn Brand is in a troubled dream, he is wrapped in a blue sheet that that replicates a storm-tossed sea.

On account of its story of alien creatures, possession of a soul, betrayal, adultery and ultimate love, Nixon describes Ondine as an adult fairytale, one where the knight Brand is in essence caught in a love triangle with the phantom-luminescent sea sprite Ondine (Dixon’s Canadian muse Martha Leebolt) and Beatrice (Dreda Blow), an instantly hooked girl from the fishing community who becomes his fiancée.

Batley and Leebolt’s extended pas de deux in the first act is electrifying, beauteous, feline and utterly dazzling. Leebolt is the most thrilling dancer at Northern Ballet since Charlotte Talbot and Batley is exhilarating too, a purist’s principal dancer, all classical lines and matinee idol grace. Dreda Blow’s more delicate dancing contrasts with the heightened physicality of Batley and Leebolt.

The sense of water’s movement is superbly conjured by Nixon’s choreography, especially when Ondine is swept away almost quicker than the eye can follow, and the ensemble, both male and female, is far more than mere decoration, especially in Act 3.

Nixon’s flowing, sensuous, magical choreography demands that you must go down to the sea today.

Ondine, Northern Ballet, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until Saturday. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk