Kirov Ballet, Royal Opera House, London

But Swan Lake occupies the default position in the ballet repertory. It's what every company turns to when they want to be seen at their technical best. It will without question secure a full house. What's more, Petersburgers ardently uphold their Swan Lake as the true keeper of the flame, its steps closest to those danced in 1895. And who's to say otherwise? Suffice to say that the Sergeyev staging is grand, stirring, eloquent in terms of choreography, clunky as drama. Every scrap of mime has been excised, so there is now no means for Odette to explain why she is both a woman and a bird, or why she is so bitterly in thrall to the pantomime villain in bad makeup. Mid-scene curtain calls crassly disrupt the action and the music. Model swans glide erratically across a painted lake.

And yet the passionate conviction of these dancers sweeps all else aside. When Uliana Lopatkina first appears, a vision of long, long white limbs picking a delicate path across the floor, all hearts are stilled. Not for nothing is Lopatkina called the Queen of Slow. Her control in adagio is now so supreme that she seems to take you with her into a drawn-out swoon, the music hushed to a whisper, breaths held as she reaches dreamily into a deep arabesque penchée, or falls back into her partner's arms.

And how tactfully Daniil Korsuntsev colludes in this witchcraft. Assuming a permanent expression of amazed tenderness he manoeuvres Lopatkina's extraordinary body as if every touch brought him closer to its beating heart.

As a soloist he is less impressive. He hasn't the plush jump of Igor Zelensky who has partnered Lopatkina in London before. But those partnering skills of his are ultimate: self-effacing, unmannered, unfazed. I liked, too, the way he played the Act III deception, obviously dazzling by Lopatkina's Odile but nagged by doubts that she was really his girl.

But a Kirov Swan Lake is always more than a two-talent wonder. In the Act I trio, Irina Golub (ranked as soloist) and Ekaterina Osmolkina (unbelievably, from the corps) are a stunning reminder of the standards this company expects. The corps de ballet as a whole is a technical wonder. The orchestra gives you new ears. And this is why, in the end, the Kirov can keep coming to London and splashing with the same old Swan Lake. Until the rest of the world breeds dancers with those limbs, those necks and those flexible feet, not to mention the same skill to deploy them, we will gawp and sigh and keep coming back for more. Jenny Gilbert

jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk

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