Swan Lake/Kirov Covent Garden, London CLEMENT CRISP

By Clement Crisp, Financial Times
Published: Jul 28, 2003

The Kirov Ballet's Swan Lake is the best in the world, the only staging that a ballet-goer can watch with an easy conscience. Elsewhere, this beautiful and most popular of all "classics" is betrayed by its producers, by its design, its intentions, by sheer damned ignorance and chutzpah, and by its interpreters.

Crimes range from the disgraceful mockery of its theme, score and dances by the Cullberg troope to the imbecile dramatics that ruin the Royal Ballet's impeccable text.

With the Kirov, a near-century of thought, of love, even of sometimes wilful Soviet tinkering has created a production where the scenery is unostentatiously good, the score is loved by its orchestra (playing superbly at Thursday night's first performance of the season) and dancers and repetiteurs have refined and shaped a style that contains, in every least action, the genetic life and truth of this ballet as they honour it.

As Act I begins, a group of courtiers enters, dancing. The lightness and spaciousness of their movement speak of nobility, of spiritual as well as physical grace - you cannot dance like this unless your art honours the highest aspirations of classic ballet.

Drama is suggested - watch the Tutor "speaking" to Siegfried about intellectual pleasures as he shows the princeling the book he is reading. An entire world of meaning exists in this briefest moment.

Watch how the pas de trois (superbly done by Irina Golub, Irina Zhelonkina and the impeccable Anton Korsakov) establishes the blissful rule of academism, and watch how the Jester (for the first time in decades) seems a justified, admirable entertainer - Andrey Ivanov is an elegant virtuoso.

And as the Danse des coupesleads the courtiers off stage, lantern-lit, and the drama gets under way, consider how this staging has prepared us for a lyric tragedy, and see then how grandly it fulfils its intentions.

And so it wonderfully went on Thursday. I found Svetlana Zakharova a cool but vividly linear Odette, a rather emphatic - but devilishly brilliant - Odile. Igor Zelensky, returned after a long period of injury, is a prince at every moment, the dance still grand, emotion still subtle, the ballet still his. Glorious artistry also from the dancers in the ballroom: the mazurka is one of the marvels of ballet in our time. Tel 020 7304 4000 www.royalopera.org.uk