A requiem of solace for young people with dance that bathes, anoints, enraptures and uplifts its audience with healing and light.

To combine a live orchestra (London Musici) with a live choir (Brighton's specially prepared Pavilion Chamber Choir), both unseen, is rare enough in a resident, let alone a touring production.

But with exciting costumes and Rambert's customarily superb and economical lighting, the sum of these parts was affecting enough —let alone the joy and absorption of taking in the responsive and evocative work of the nine girls and 11 boy dancers of Britain's oldest and flagship contemporary company.

Eternal Light began the programme of four works. It impacted slowly and ultimately deeply from its standing start, yet could equally far-reachingly have concluded the evening in what would have been potentially an overwhelming summation.

Rambert's artistic director, the New Zealander Mark Baldwin, has combined as choreographer with English composer Howard Goodall (commissioned by the 20-year-old London Musici), and with designer Michael Howells and lighting artist Michael Mannion in a collaboration along the precious and revered working format lines set by Serge Diaghilev and his Ballet Russes.

Diaghilev, blazing a trail for all time, and with pioneering choreographers Nijinsky and Fokine already on board, famously brought in people like Ravel and Stravinsky, Picasso, Matisse and Chanel.

Company founder Marie Rambert, a Pole, danced with Russes briefly in 1913, enough to taste one of the richest experiences possible in dance and theatrical history. Since the 1980s, Rambert have consciously worked that way and Eternal Light is one of their highest peaks.

Goodall is a pleasing composer of the modern media age.And, like Brahms did successfully with his own German Requiem, he veers onto a different path, away from the founding and normally all-enveloping Latin ritual of the Catholic Mass for the Dead.

He draws in his 10 movements on some familiar poetry of mourning. And he uses just 11 strings, a piano and keyboard, for a musical transparency of texture to enhance the aural poetry in the choir, plus solo soprano and tenor, and to project the visual movement of Baldwin's dance.

The effect creeps gradually up on the audience. It seeps slowly inside and there was a palpable glow of recognition by the conclusion.

The sudden late appearance of a totally incongruous toucan bird among the human figures, in almost a pas de deux with one of the males, adds an extra dimension, which Baldwin intends to portray man's uneasy relationship with nature. It is a parting reminder of our place in the animal world.

Baldwin's abstract starting point is two paintings: the dark French human shipwreck tragedy-scandal depicted in The Raft of Medusa by Gericault, and the grief-stricken yet colourful Italian post-crucifixion scene of Pontormo's The Deposition from the Cross.

In Baldwin's overall theme, lamentation and loss juxtaposes with rapture and ecstasy, perhaps of final release,and the choreography frequently touches on the element of flight. This and the toucan may well be symbolic man's final achievement of emulating the bird world, in the death flight of the soul.

The bizarre choice of the toucan itself could acknowledge the innate human pursuit of humour and craving of the exotic.

Howells' white is the overriding costume scheme, the men bare-chested, sometimes in leggings and overbriefs, sometimes, as the women, in tight trousers profusely flared from the knee downwards bearing the streaked colours of grass and blood.

Green does appear fully, briefly, along with two magnificent feather headdresses in the Litany, to Ann Thorp's "I have to believe that you still exist, somewhere." And there is one racy design, also in green, on the woman in the pas de deux of the Agnus Dei, the prayer for final peace.

Mannion's lighting strays from monochrome just the once, tellingly, for the haemoglobin red of the Dies Irae, in which crystals bejewel a row of hanging crosses/tombstones.

Brighton received it with its trademark enthusiasm. Likewise the other works, the first two scored for strings and piano.

Mikaela Polley and Alexander Whitley contributed Two Solos as Tribute to Norman Morrice, the ex-Rambert and Royal Ballet artistic director.

The beautiful Miguel Altunaga and Eryck Brahmania were the dancers, to Vaughan Williams' Fantasy Quintet (piano and strings) and Katchachurian's Sonato for Cello and Piano.

Angela Towler and Martin Joyce used Arvo Pärt's Sonogram for their See Me of 2008, whose three girls and three boys in Turkish trousers included Towler, Joyce, Whitley and again Brahmania.

And finally, to the work of no less a British choreographical great as Siobhan Davies. Carnival Of The Animals, revisited from 1982, provided a totally unorthodox take on Saint-Saens' zoological extravaganza.

No animals. People are the animals. Antony McDonald's people in white evening suits and waistcoats with coloured accessories, the girls in various forms of fun evening garb, explore the borders between character and action among human and animal.

Plenty of entertainment and lots of humour, with Brahmania again excelling, solo — serious — in The Swan. This male cygnet, note, predated Matthew Bourne's Lake.

This dance programme is unlikely to be surpassed in Brighton this year. Can Rambert do so themselves next? It would be unfair to expect that.

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