Nutcracker, Royal Festival Hall, London<br/>Don Quixote, Royal Festival Hall, London

Russian cities have ballet companies the way English cities have football teams, and the tag "Moscow's second company" might not seem much of a recommendation until you consider the competition. The Stanislavsky may be smaller than the Bolshoi, but with 130 dancers it is vast by Western standards. It sources its talent from the same pool as its neighbour, and its corps de ballet has the same kind of physical perfection that makes you wonder if they breed girls specially to have legs like that, or if it's some fluke of Russian training that gives them identical knees.

Russian cities have ballet companies the way English cities have football teams, and the tag "Moscow's second company" might not seem much of a recommendation until you consider the competition. The Stanislavsky may be smaller than the Bolshoi, but with 130 dancers it is vast by Western standards. It sources its talent from the same pool as its neighbour, and its corps de ballet has the same kind of physical perfection that makes you wonder if they breed girls specially to have legs like that, or if it's some fluke of Russian training that gives them identical knees.

This is the company's third winter residency at the Festival Hall, and the general standard of dancing continues to rise. It may just be that the dancers have learnt to cope with the venue's quirks: an awkwardly wide and shallow stage, and not much in the way of wings. But equally the Stanislavky Ballet's Nutcracker - based on a standard old Russian revision but redesigned for this space - has bedded in too. Vladimir Arefyev's designs, daringly abstract for Russia, are not only strikingly pretty but make a virtue of keeping clear of the floor. Screens of frosted windows, cut-out snowflakes, and finally a wall of wire mobiles that spin gently with every passing draught, provide constant interest without being distracting. Other ideas raise eyebrows: the powdery snowfall in what is meant to be a family sitting room, and a Christmas tree that, instead of growing as per Tchaikovsky's score, shrinks to nothing in a puff of smoke. I think the rats' snouts poking down from the ceiling were meant to be the transformation, but I'm not sure every spectator performed the mental gymnastics to see that they were fir trees upside down.

That's the thing about Russian ballet right now. After almost a century of creative inertia, companies are starting to think that design could be an important element in the art form. Next, who knows, they may start excavating protagonists' inner lives. But this Nutcracker doesn't go that far. Forget post-Freudian insights, forget even metaphor: this is simply the story of a little girl who falls asleep after a party and dreams about her toys, the mice in the wainscot, the snow in the window, and finally about being grown up. Act I has one ballerina in a nightie, clutching a wooden soldier, and Act II stars a different dancer, grandly tutu'd and remote. Audiences used to plot development may feel short-changed. Russians, for their part, can't see a problem. Ballet is about steps and technique, and there are buckets of both.

The two big ensembles - the snowflakes and the waltz of the flowers - are the choreographic peaks, chiselling patterns out of stiff white net with precision and flair. I loved the suggestion of a coming-out ball in the waltz, lines of boys done up in high collars like young Pierre Bezuhovs, the girls fizzing up between them like champagne corks. Vladimir Grigoriev's Prince wears a look of delighted surprise that the legs beneath him can do the things they do. Natalia Ledovskaya delivers a Sugar Plum variation so crystalline, so dreamily perfect, that even the orchestra seems to hold its breath.

'Nutcracker': Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (08704 050 050), today; then 'Don Quixote' to 16 January

jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk