When the Kirov Ballet came to New York in 2002, it pulled into the Met like the greatest show on earth. The company brought a this-is-how-it’s-done Don Quixote and a Swan Lake with the lovely, dusty sheen of old velvet in stone castles. Its La Bayadère, like The Sleeping Beauty brought here in 1999, was an experiment in history retrieved, a ballet rebuilt from notated texts, and though not wholly satisfying as a work of art, it was a restoration with many fascinations. And then there were three splendid performances of George Balanchine’s Jewels, which arrived with a newly designed set, still minimalist, but less the static parure that was the design for decades at New York City Ballet and more a swirling star shower from above, as if the vaults of heaven had opened.

When I think of the Kirov, I think of vaults. It’s not just the rich history of this company, which reaches back into the eighteenth century and is an inheritance to be reckoned with. It’s the arcing interior spaces that live in company style, the result of a shared technique learned in the Vaganova Academy, and a shared city of imperial raiments. All those golden domes against the moonstone-blue St. Petersburg sky, all those cupolas and colonnades. We see these architectural beauties in the dancing, nowhere more clearly than in Kirov women, in the celestial sphere balanced in their upper bodies, and in the Romanesque windows built into their épaulement.