The overture to Swan Lake begins with a high F-sharp held out over a void. The tone is plaintive, isolated—a long sigh. It is on this same high, held note that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky begins his famous “swan theme,” though by the time we first hear it, at the end of act I, that tone no longer seems a sigh, but a state. This is the theme everyone hums when they hear the words Swan Lake, the mysterious theme that keeps trying to vault above that opening F-sharp, which it hits three more times in four measures as if the note were a spell that must be broken. Meanwhile, the melodic line, thin as incense, curls in a turmoil of metamorphosis. In a mere four measures, Tchaikovsky has sounded out the ballet: Odette is spellbound, a swan-woman trapped in perpetual transformation, ravishingly so. In a mere four measures, we have heard Tchaikovsky’s genius for turning sound into silhouette, incantation into shape, seduction into soul. No wonder this theme was used as the overture for the Bela Lugosi Dracula in 1931. Swan Lake is less a fairy tale than it is that shocking blossom of romanticism: a horror story. It is a tale of doubles and doom in the manner of Hoffmann or Coleridge or Poe.

The provenance of Tchaikovsky’s first ballet, premiered in 1877, is lost in the mists of time. The names that appear on Swan Lake’s libretto are Begichev and Geltser, but scholars question their authorship because Tchaikovsky’s fingerprints are everywhere. In his superb book Tchaikovsky’s Ballets, Roland John Wiley points to nearby sources such as a folktale by Musäus called The Swans’ Pond, and, more compellingly, Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, in which a white swan figures symbolically. Tchaikovsky admired Lohengrin, calling it “the crown of Wagner’s creations.”

It isn’t just Wagner’s opera, however, that Wiley detects in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, but Tchaikovsky’s own earlier operas—Undine (1869) and Mandragora (1870)—as well as his incidental music for The Snow Maiden (1873). All share the same scenario, the tragic love between a non-mortal woman and a mortal man. “Tchaikovsky destroyed Undine and abandoned Mandragora,” writes Wiley. “It is possible that he perceived in Swan Lake a vehicle more satisfactory than the others to present this kind of love story, which he seemed to find so attractive.” In a kind of transmutation, the love duet from Undine would become the act II lakeside pas de deux in Swan Lake.

And then there is the living-room ballet called “The Lake of the Swans,” which Tchaikovsky created for family entertainments at least five years before he began work on Swan Lake. “The staging of the ballet was done entirely by Pyotr Ilyich,” remembered Tchaikovsky’s nephew Yury Lvovich Davydov. “It was he who invented the steps and pirouettes, and he danced them himself, showing the performers what he required of them … as he sang the tune.” Furthermore, according to Davydov, “the principal theme—‘The Song of the Swans’—was then the same as now.” This is not so much a fingerprint as a potent piece of DNA.

What we know for sure is that a score like Swan Lake’s was utterly new to ballet. Its orchestral depth and richness, tonalities like layers of consciousness, and musico-dramatic wholeness inspired musicologists to deem it the first “symphonic” ballet. But it also contains the sinuous inner contours of opera—narrow paths, fates unfolding, voices. “Take any pas de deux,” George Balanchine has said of Swan Lake, “their melodies are absolutely vocal.” In Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky plumbed the singing line for mass and space, tempered it for embodiment. Swan Lake is the first ballet score in which we feel rapt corporeal presence, psychosexual weight. It’s a ballet Freud could put on the couch and analyze.

Indeed, Swan Lake is a cliff-drop into sensuality, and Odette looks like no other creature in ballet. Giselle may be undead but she is never less than human. The Sylph is made of air and wing, but she was formed in man’s image. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Queen, however … well, what is she? Swan by day, human by night, her clock akin to the vampire’s? Or is she a hybrid of man and bird, something like the Fly? Is she the Ideal as Escape? Sublimation as the Sublime? No one knows and no one need know. She is Tchaikovsky—an F-sharp tense within a melody that arches like a swan’s neck, aches like a question mark. She is the sound of desire.

In Tchaikovsky’s own life, desire was a subject increasingly fraught. In his definitive biography, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (Schirmer Books, 1990), Alexander Poznansky explains that while Tchaikovsky was a confirmed and generally guilt-free homosexual, he nevertheless knew that his sexual preference made him and his loved ones vulnerable to dangerous gossip. In 1876, the year he composed Swan Lake, fears of blackmail, however exaggerated, were swirling in his head. He began toying with the idea of marriage, thinking a bow to convention would secure a zone of protection around his name and work. In early May 1877, less than three months after the premiere of Swan Lake and a few weeks before he started work on the opera Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky began courting the music student Antonina Milyukova. By the end of May he had proposed a mariage blanc. She accepted and married without understanding, and then expected—to his horror, despair, disgust—the real thing. It was over (unconsummated) in two months, at which point Tchaikovsky began referring to Milyukova as “the reptile.”

Explaining it later, Tchaikovsky (and his biographer-peers) liked to imply that he was caught up in the heady parallels between Onegin and himself, Tatiana and Antonina. Poznansky views this as wishful thinking. There is a better parallel. Swan Lake is about a disastrous marriage, a prince who out of duty must wed, finds an otherworldly soulmate in the strange white swan Odette, and then mistakenly makes a vow of love to the black swan Odile, the evil, rather reptilian, double of Odette. It’s not a perfect parallel, of course. To begin with, Tchaikovsky essentially deceived himself. But like his marriage, Swan Lake is a flower of his fears, the creature from his black lagoon. Tchaikovsky’s twilight anxieties—a longing for resolve, a pervasive mistrust—are at home in these reeds and waters.

Swan Lake has ghoulish trappings—old stone castles, a shape-shifting villain (Von Rothbart, who takes the form of bat or owl)—but the ballet is usually produced prettily, with storybook simplicity. Last season, Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, an import from England, plundered the sexual subtext and became a pop phenomenon with an extended run on Broadway. Recasting Swan Lake with a gender twist, Bourne turned up the gothic high dudgeon, giving us a story of sexual hysteria set in Buckingham Palace. The prince—love-starved, hungry for something—ends in madness, a sort of self-immolation by swan.

Bourne’s Swan Lake is not a ballet. It is a giddy piece of theater masquerading as dance, which places it, for me, outside the realm of real Swan Lakes. In the manner of Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut, which set The Nutcracker in an acidic Sixties suburb, Bourne’s production updates Swan Lake (party dances are the Twist and the Frug, though the Queen Mum still wears Dior silhouettes from the Fifties). The staging is impressive, continuously clever, with the overscaled prop from one scene gliding and revolving to unlock the next scene, like objects floating through a dream retold. And in the lakeside “white acts,” Bourne makes the story his own. Act II is a London park —all white plaster surrealism, very Cecil Beaton in Vogue—a gay wink. Act IV is a white straitjacket in a white room--shock-therapy apotheosis.

The big gimmick in this production is that the swans are danced by bare-chested men in woolly (why not feathers?) white bloomers and punk makeup. Odette might be thought of as a Mapplethorpian orchid, a multi-cult “Other,” while Odile is rough trade in black leather—a bisexual threat. For a while, the spectacle of powdered pecs and powerful arms is fascinating—the male weight rocks the score like an overloaded boat. And always, when a stage is full of raw young guys moving as one, there is that communal, feral thrill in the audience—a cheap thrill, but potent in its moment. The point where the choreography should be most inventive, however—the swans—is where invention falls away. Bourne had deftly cut the score elsewhere, but it sounds as if he’s used every last drop of the white acts. This leaves a lot of time to see that his swan steps are modern-dance pastiche, mostly waist-up and heavily repetitive. The erotic charge quickly goes flat—“okay, flap-flap, boy swans.” The strangeness is not where it should be, in the steps.

I admit to a gut reaction against Bourne’s vision of the swan as male. Yes, there is a rush in the score dynamic enough to support masculine muscle. But Bourne’s Swan Lake does not, cannot, sing. Tchaikovsky understood ballerinas, and was known to do fair imitations of them. His feathery orchestrations speak to slim female ankles and delicate wrists. His slides up the scale beg for the trill of finger turns and pirouettes on pointe. And his adagios, like a soprano’s arias (that F-sharp is soprano range), are at one with the lengthening of line made possible by women’s pointe work and deep plié (men do not lift any higher than demi-pointe, nor do they articulate plié with as much roundness and refinement). Lev Ivanov, choreographer of the 1895 Maryinsky white acts that have remained the template for stagings ever since, responded to Tchaikovsky with metaphors—shapes that nest in space, steps en tournant in which the two-sided spell (day/night) seems to reverberate ad infinitum. Bourne’s muscle-beach birds have not the existential poetry of women —the corps as state of grace or moaning mass grave.

Still, conventional Swan Lake’s are harder and harder to sit through. Clichés of staging have grown thick and predictable (all those pleasant peasants), the national dances look tediously rote, and no one seems to know what to do with that storm-swept act IV where Tchaikovsky, lashing toward death and transcendence under a rising astral canopy, overwhelms most attempts at staging (Bourne’s best stroke was his imploding finale—he makes it an electrical brainstorm, horror-story hyperbole). Regarding Odette, today’s ballerinas think they know her— they think she is a white tutu, a flutter of arms, a tragic face. You no longer feel them sinking into her arched-back attitudes as into abyss, the way Natalia Makarova used to do. You no longer feel them plunged into that sacrificial plastique, the coursing arabesques and imperious soutenus. Eloquently helpless, sadistically enchanted, sullied yet pure—Odette is like Garbo’s throat, a place or grace that is beyond the pale of today’s gen-X female imagination. She is a daughter of adagio, that magisterial elaboration of line which, in its continuous pull between arrest and movement, builds a monument to emotion. In scoring Odette’s themes for the reedy oboe, Tchaikovsky was clear about the struggle on his mind—she is sucked down by the marshes even as she reaches for the moon.

Odile comes easier. She’s a power bird—a bravura performance of sharp attack and freer plastique. In his Swan Lake of 1951, George Balanchine was right to dispense with the court, the plot, the national dances. “I remember when Swan Lake was performed at the Mariinsky Theater,” he told Solomon Volkov in Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky, “no one ever understood anything!” [His italics!] Balanchine elided acts II and IV into a fantasia of Swan Lake, dropping the ballerina into a blue current that swept her up and away.

What would he have thought of last spring’s Swan Lake at New York City Ballet? Probably what everybody thought: “Why?” As part of the company’s fiftieth anniversary season, it read like a non sequitur—it was everything Balanchine had attempted to forego with his own concentrated version. Coming on the heels of Bourne’s Swan Lake, with its theatrical brio, its full-frontal eros, Peter Martins’s production looked dispassionate, flat—no sex drive at all. It’s as if Martins were playing his own version of the prince, forced by duty into a loveless marriage with Swan Lake.

There isn’t much good to say about the production. Per Kirkeby’s sets were minimal suggestions of place, and the few props—a crossbow on a pillow, a throne—had the bright, static look of icons on a computer screen. While the lakeside acts were blue-gray Silly String abstractions, act III, a looming wood-paneled room, could have been office space for a CEO. Around Ivanov’s heated duets and solos, Martins supplied the kind of cold, fast, dancers-in-endless-lines-of-four choreography he does to the music of Michael Torke and Charles Wuorinen.

Into this empty exercise came the company’s unprepared Odette-Odiles. Some tried squeezing into the swan’s introverted, curve-on-curve plastique (Monique Meunier kept popping out of it, as if her stays wouldn’t hold). Others sort of skimmed along the top, connecting the solos. What else could they do? You can’t just put on that tutu and be Odette in a full-length production. It takes layers of commitment —emotional, technical, communal—to the style and the story. The style is the story. But it’s just an outline to these women, not in their tradition. You can see they don’t know how to make it theirs, and consequently they have no love for it. In fact, Martins actually choreographed this Swan Lake for the Royal Danish Ballet, where it was premiered a year ago. Why it was deemed appropriate for the New York City Ballet is a mystery not of the lakeside, but the board room.

The Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky’s second ballet, is also about a marriage, also fixed on the continuation of the royal line—but what a different marriage it is. Premiered in 1890, thirteen years after Swan Lake, Beauty is like day to Swan Lake’s night. You hear the difference at once, in the overtures. Where Swan Lake is a lone voice floating in darkness, Sleeping Beauty begins in discourse: the ripping cry and kettledrum rumble of the furious fairy Carabosse is answered and subdued by the calm breeze and harp glissandos of the Lilac Fairy. Where Swan Lake’s overture builds with the throb of obsession, in Beauty we experience the social fabric —torn, then mended—of the true fairy tale. It’s difficult not to feel an almost ontological force at work in these two scores. Swan Lake sounds like a ballet conceived in mist and composed in isolation. Beauty is the blossom of a close, committed, and well-documented collaboration between Tchaikovsky and the masters of the Mariinsky Ballet—the director Ivan Vsevolozhsky and the choreographer Marius Petipa. In short, Sleeping Beauty is a marriage of like minds.

The idea was Vsevolozhsky’s. He was keen on a collaboration between Tchaikovsky, Petipa, and himself, but his first proposal, Undine, didn’t interest Tchaikovsky (who may have felt he’d been-there-done-that). The scenario Vsevolozhsky prepared from Charles Perrault’s La Belle au bois dormant, however, charmed the Francophile in all three men (though French, Petipa thought himself a Russian artist). “I want to do the mise en scène in Louis XIV style,” Vsevolozhsky wrote. “Here one could let one’s musical fantasy run wild and compose melodies in the spirit of Lully, Bach, Rameau, etc.” It would be a sumptuous production, a ballet-féerie set in Versailles. But more than that, Beauty would be a supreme integration of aesthetic affinities—musical, theatrical, epochal—with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideals recapitulated in nineteenth-century forms, and lyric flight (the troubadour’s rose) absorbed into classical amplitude (the Baroque sunburst). Beginning in the era of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and ending in the clouds of Apollo, the Sun God, the ballet is framed in light, and offers an implicit, flattering portrait of Russia’s Czar Alexander III who was footing the bill. Implicit as well was a bold territorial statement: Beauty suggests it was the Russian Ballet—not French—that was now “continuing the line” of classical dance.

Petipa wrote up a detailed choreo-musical libretto (in the Vision Scene coda, for example, he wants “music with mutes—a 2/4 as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), and Tchaikovsky responded with a masterpiece that is its own dreaming kingdom, a score not easily altered or rearranged. Tchaikovsky’s light touch shows the influence, not of Lully, but of Delibes’s Coppélia and Sylvia, ballets Tchaikovsky had come to know only after he wrote Swan Lake. And he’d made another adjustment. Gone, the sturm und drang of Wagner; the operatic model for Beauty is the self-contained, human-scaled, witty, and forgiving opera of Tchaikovsky’s god, Mozart. In Beauty, sensuality is not dangerously concentrated in one being (like Odette in Swan Lake), it is in the order of the material world, touching all things. Tchaikovsky’s score—the rapture of its orchestral colors, the splendor of its suspension-bridge structure, its melodies like lush brocades and long vistas—is a realm where characters fall and grow, where the senses graduate into sensibility. The Sleeping Beauty is an Enlightenment ballet.

For Wiley, the score makes brilliant choices tantamount to a philosophical statement. In Swan Lake, keys are locked in opposition, searching in vain for resolution. But in Beauty, the principal keys “have no commanding interrelationship beyond their compatibility with the key of resolution [G],” to which all these keys lead. Furthermore, “In Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky chooses E minor and E major to portray the malevolent and benevolent aspects of Aurora’s destiny, personified by Carabosse and the Lilac Fairy … they are quite different, yet in some respects the same.” Good and evil, life and death, E-ternally bound: this, too, is in the order of things. Such balances in the story and the score--embodied in Aurora’s famous balances in the Rose Adagio—make Beauty the lyric expression of a cherished hope: that good does subdue evil, that humankind will always right itself. This is why Beauty is beloved, why that first production bound so many young artists —Anna Pavlova, Leon Bakst, and later George Balanchine—to ballet. In Sleeping Beauty, civilization is an art, and art, a civilization. This is why the Royal Ballet’s Beauty of 1946, with Margot Fonteyn as Aurora, had such a profound impact. After so much death, it looked like dawn.

But what did the first Sleeping Beauty look like? You can imagine the excitement among balletomanes when it was learned that the Kirov Ballet, now under the direction of Makhar Vasiev, was reconstructing the 1890 Beauty. Memories of a Beauty the company brought to New York in 1989 had, for me, dwindled to a felt hat with a curling feather, a vine-covered scrim, a slow evening of powder-pastels. That was a Beauty of patchy provenance, a long way and a few revolutions from Vsevolozhsky and Petipa, though compared to shiny American Beautys the old-world dustiness had charm. This new—or rather, new-old—Beauty was the result of a chance comment the American scholar Tim Scholl made to Vaziev: “Have you seen the Sergeyev notes?” He was referring to the extensive notations that Nikolai Sergeyev had made of Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty at the beginning of the century, notations that were asleep in the Harvard Theatre Collection. (A second Sergeyev— Konstatin—ran the Kirov from the 1950s through the 1970s, and made his own changes to Beauty in those years.)

For a blow-by-blow story of the restoration, go to Ballet Review (Spring 1999), where the mapping and weighing of Nikolai Sergeyev’s notes, the matching of his steps and floor plans against old memories and even older Beautys, is fascinating aesthetic detective work. Meanwhile, the reports from visitors to Russia were raves. There was also backstage politics. Russian dancers, traditionally, don’t like to try new things—even new-old things. The senior dancers didn’t like this Beauty (because it wasn’t their Beauty), and the younger dancers didn’t like the wigs. The long blonde Louis Quinze curls Prince Désiré wears in act II almost bit the dust when one dancer refused to wear them (he relented, when the other dancer cast as prince said he’d wear the wig). At the end of June, the Kirov Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre unveiled its restored Sleeping Beauty at the Met.

The first chills came with the first strokes of the overture. Under the baton of Gianandrea Noseda, the Kirov Ballet Orchestra tore into Tchaikovsky—swift, fierce, ascendant—taking full possession of the music not by right of long lineage, but by the feline vigor and acute sensitivity with which it inhabited Tchaikovsky’s world of sounds. This wasn’t going to be one of those stately Beautys. In seconds, the audience was sitting up straighter—all the better to see the sights.

The lovely sepia-tint archival photos in the souvenir program—Aurora in amber— simply didn’t prepare you for the clash of colors when the curtain went up: yellows, violets, turquoise, emerald green (later, chlorine green in the Vision Scene), not to mention gold and silver, pearls and embroideries, sashes and plumes. The artist Alexander Benois, there at the beginning, thought the combination of costume colors garish, and it is—vibrantly, vibratingly. We are now so conditioned to seeing color- coordinated productions of the classics, so used to equating authenticity or relevance with a homogenized façade, we feel adrift when we don’t get that façade (and then vaguely disappointed when we do). The life force of these colors was a revelation—and not lost on the crowd.

The sets stick with Vsevolozhsky’s plan of Versailles-like courts, bedchambers, gardens, and forests. But within architectural backdrops full of ornate play—trompe-l’oeil vaults and niches—Vsevolozhsky had a field day with the costumes. The corsetted, bustled, tapissier (upholsterer) style of the contemporary couturier Charles Worth (who had dressed Empress Eugénie) is used for the Lilac Fairy’s act II costume and Princess Aurora’s wedding gown—linking them in divine right, and also keeping them fashionably up-to-date (the other court ladies are back with Louis in abbreviated panniers.) And what about those red-and-white striped tights like gondola poles—stripes everywhere!—and the explosion of plackets and pom-poms? Tim Scholl has noted that St. Petersburg connoisseurs were, at the time, under the spell of the commedia dell’arte. Vsevolozhsky mixed fantasy and fact, centuries and styles, with the cheek of Diana Vreeland.

Four hours long, this Beauty flies by. It is divided into four short acts with three intermissions, as American Ballet Theatre’s currently is. Yet it never feels heavy, as ABT’s does. One of the glories of this production is its easy sense of time. Petipa opens the prologue with pageantry and pantomime, taking special care to make relationships clear. He’s telling the story, and the dances that follow simply open that story to the atmosphere. When the fairies promenade in with their entourages, the party begins. When the fairies dance, a magic, almost psychedelic, garden is born onstage. This swing between forms of expression makes for a metaphysical balance, a luxurious pace (a magical mystery tour!) that’s never slow.

This marvelous pace allows us time to use our eyes, to see more. For instance, I love the way the solo of the Wheat Flour Fairy is followed, of course, by the Breadcrumbs Fairy—who has mice appliquéd on her tutu, wanting their share of crumbs. Who’s next, but a bird, the Canary Fairy. In Vsevolozhsky and Petipa’s kingdom, even the crumbs connect. And when the big bad fairy Carabosse storms the party, moving with hump-backed menace, it’s a black cat that adorns her cape. The cat-and-mouse in the costumes is just another of the eternal circles in this Beauty.

On a deeper level, the material richness of the production connects with one of its primary choreographic metaphors—not the image of the rose, central to the ballet and redolent of Aurora, but its sister image, the spindle. Both spiral around a stem or axis, both have sharp points—both evoke a ballerina up on pointe. But where the rose suggests one, the spindle suggests the interweaving, the interdependence, of many. And like a sewing needle appearing and disappearing in cloth, the idea of the point —not only its danger, but its power—keeps flashing in this Beauty, reiterated in its props: knitting needles, the Lilac Fairy’s silver sword, Prince Désiré’s arrow. Everyone, the production seems to say, has a point.

Petipa put ample space around his pointes. In one of the production’s striking reversions, the Lilac Fairy’s big solo in the prologue no longer consists of those grand, horizon-like leg sweeps that no one can quite do these days. Instead, it’s a series of beautifully modeled passes which, once you get used to it, is more syntactically compatible with Aurora’s solos, their Singer sewing machine verticality and precision, their piqué (pricked) footwork. More interesting still, is Petipa’s continual return to attitude en avant, the leg hooked in front of the body. He uses it again and again, usually angled croisé, so much that it becomes as important as the attitude derrière—the pose of Mercury that is Aurora’s signature pose and the iconic focus of productions ever since. Attitude en avant acts as a little gate to the stage, a thorn-like protection of Tchaikovsky’s kingdom (surely these attitudes were an influence on Frederick Ashton). It also presents the pointe on a pillow of air.

If the body’s rise and fall is fixed in the pointed toe, pantomime and dance meet in the pointed finger. It is employed everywhere in Petipa’s Beauty—by the fairies for sculptural finish; by Carabosse to spell fate; by Aurora to show her wound; and by Lilac, tapped against her forehead, to say “Think.” This Beauty passes from fingertip to fingertip to fingertip, a golden thread of artistic impulse and inspiration.

Of the many adorable touches in this Beauty, one stands out. At the end of the prologue, having cast the spell of death on Aurora—only to have it softened by Lilac— Carabosse is leaving. As her carriage pulls away, all the fairies and courtiers crowd after her, their backs to the audience, all wagging a finger high in the air. Writing in The New York Times, Anna Kisselgoff sniffed, “It is hard to believe that Petipa would have the King and the entire court waving a finger at Carabosse.” Is it? I find it hard to believe that this thrilling moment, so poetically true to the texture of the whole, so palpably Petipa, so dear, was ever allowed to go missing. “It will not be,” they seem to say, and there is no moment in all of ballet so full of its own unity. By the way, in his detailed research on the first production, Wiley comes to the prologue’s end and writes, “All present threaten Carabosse.”

How does the Kirov look in this Beauty? Like the dancers understand it, despite their qualms. They perform mime with such largesse, it makes you happy. You feel the shape of the story fitting large inside the ballet—a sort of silent-movie scale—and it’s utterly involving, especially today, when stories are no longer shown or told, just implied, assumed. Perhaps another circle is coming around. With the sensations of robo-dancer speed and flexibility becoming ever more thin and undifferentiated, it is human rhythm that looks new and fresh.

As for Aurora, ever since the touchstone performances of Margot Fonteyn, and later the Kirov’s Irina Kolpakova and Alla Sizova, critics have looked to this role as privileged and definitive, and also as an indicator of company health—Aurora as annual report. Given the symbolisms in the ballet, it’s tempting to view the role this way, but it can mar one’s enjoyment of Beauty. A born Aurora—a bright future—doesn’t come along every day. It’s well to remember that St. Petersburg balletomanes thought the first Aurora, Italian ballerina Carlotta Brianza, a “little brown imp.” This production made me see Beauty as the ensemble work it is—the little kingdom that is every classical ballet company.

The Kirov is currently in a youthful phase, with a batch of new ballerinas fresh out of the gate. Svetlana Zakharova had opening night. Long, slim, exceedingly flexible, with a smiling porcelain-doll face, she’s the company ingenue. Zakharova’s tendency toward trick extensions, legs flipped up mindlessly high, can make her gauche, but her upper body, the curvaceous modeling of her head, shoulders, and back, is lyric. Diana Vishneva’s Aurora was deeper, plummier, more musically aware and daring (even impulsive; there’s a touch of wildness in Vishneva). The way she arched soulfully sideways to drop her handful of roses—echoing, one critic noted, the handle of a basket—was Russian poetry and an example of the unusually soft finish she likes to put on a phrase (later in the week, her act II in Giselle was softness-on-softness, again, with daring musical accents like jags of unbound energy). Altynai Asylmuratova had the matinee, not quite the place for the woman who was the company princess only ten years ago. But ten years can be a lifetime in ballet. She is weaker in the lower body (which was never technically strong), but above, majestic, poised. She is harder, with a snap of sell on her finishes, but also absolutely clear, showing the social flow of Aurora’s attentions. Her arabesque is still mighty, and now weighty—it centers her in the story. And makes her moving.

When asked why the company took on this restoration of The Sleeping Beauty, Sergei Vikharev, the dancer who restaged it, told Ballet Review, “It’s not a question of whether the current [Konstantin Sergeyev] version suits us or not, but of what is now called The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky. Does it have anything to do with Tchaikovsky or Petipa? Should the Theater even use their names in its programs?” Self-questioning at the Kirov? This is an amazing development. So too the company’s dancing of Balanchine, as it showed in its all-Balanchine evenings at the Met. Not only was he performed without petulance, but faster, looser, lighter, and, in the dancing of Uliana Lopatkina in Symphony in C, phrased (good god!), embraced in phrasing. It was the second movement new-minted—and in the penchée, no tacky nose touched to knee, but measure, breath, a rose opening. A complete surprise from this usually steely ballerina, the performance made one, for the first time, think: They have all of Balanchine before them.

And they have Tchaikovsky, which is everything.