Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, May 17 and 18 (matinee)

Old politicians are never the ones who die in battle, are they? Jiří Kylián’s Soldier’s Mass (1980) isn’t the only ballet to illustrate that poignant truth but it is one of the most affecting.

With Bohuslav Martinů’s anguished Field Mass (1939) ringing in their ears, 12 young men face war and their fears. They are seen at first swaying from side to side in front of a blue sky with a curved red horizon line (Kylián designed set and costumes). Here they stand, buffeted by fate and heading for a conclusion that is never in doubt.

The distinction between the soldiers they are forced to be and the community they once were is constantly blurred as formal battle formations give way to group folk dances and gestures of tender support.

As the dance goes on the sky gradually, inevitably darkens. To the sound of martial trumpets, drums that crack like bullets and a stirring male choir, the men advance and retreat, gather and disperse. They fall then rise and fall again as death repeatedly takes its toll. Individuals emerge momentarily from the pack but are inexorably subsumed back into it. They can’t escape their destiny and you would need a heart of stone to remain unmoved.

Martinů, who was born in Czechoslovakia as was Kylián, wrote this music in 1939 after the Nazis invaded his homeland as an act of support for the Resistance. As Soldier’s Mass comes to its end, red light stains the men’s light-coloured shirts. They take their shirts off and throw them to the ground. They won’t be needing them anymore.

On opening night and at the next day’s matinee the Queensland Ballet men looked spent at the end of this wrenching half-hour, as well they may. They danced Soldier’s Mass with affecting seriousness and purpose, even if the commanding, weighty groundedness of Kylián’s style wasn’t entirely captured by everyone.

Soldier’s Mass closes QB’s triple bill. The women of the company (and a few men) open it with George Balanchine’s glorious Serenade, a love letter to the language and history of classical dance. Serenade (1935) is a balletomane’s dream with its references to Giselle, hints of Swan Lake and homage to Balanchine’s own Apollo, made in 1928. And has any other choreographer made fifth position of arms and feet look more radiant? (It’s a rhetorical question.)

Serenade was the first ballet Balanchine made in the US and is famous for its incorporation of errors made by his student cast – a late arrival, a fall. It was reworked several times to reach its current sublime form and is now unthinkable without the floaty, romantic Karinska costumes designed in 1952.

The QB women – 20 of them – were lustrous at both performances I saw, particularly Lucy Green as the Russian Girl in the first cast. The downside on opening night (fixed for the Saturday matinee) was a persistent buzz in the sound system that did no favours to the recording of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. There was, unfortunately, no live music for this program.

Serenade and Soldier’s Mass bookended American choreographer Trey McIntyre’s new The Shadows Behind Us, a minor work in which six glamorous couples enact romantic entanglements.

McIntyre’s busy vignettes mix ballet and ballroom and have lots of quirky moves and complicated, often awkward-looking partnering that may have looked more persuasive had there been a better fit between dance and music. It was a treat, though, to be introduced to American jazz singer Jimmy Scott (he died in 2014).

The Shadows Behind Us is set to half a dozen popular songs, given slow, torchy treatment by Scott, who had a condition that delayed his development, leaving him with a voice akin to that of a female alto. The selections include Unchained Melody, Our Day Will Come and, disconcertingly, Exodus, a song written for the film of that name about the founding of Israel.

A disconnect between song and dance can be artistically fruitful (as with Merce Cunningham and John Cage) but here the juxtaposition felt inert and immaterial. It made sense to read in the program that McIntyre “doesn’t really listen to the lyrics in pop songs”. The Shadows Behind Us may have been rather more memorable if he had a different view.

The best duo by far is that for two men to Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child, danced with a satisfying combination of power and grace by David Power and D’Arcy Brazier (at the first performance) and Pol Andrés Thió and Suguru Otsuka (at the matinee).

The work looks attractive, with its women in knee-length party frocks with voluminous underskirts and men in suits minus shirts.

The Masters Series ends May 25. This is an expanded version of a review that appeared in The Australian on May 20.