Music: Nijinsky’s Heirs

Ballet buffs waited patiently for 33 steamy hours outside Manhattan’s musty old Metropolitan Opera House merely for the privilege of buying standing-room tickets. Others had queued up three weeks earlier—at 5 a.m.—to snap up seats that cost as much as $50 a pair. Late-risers shuffled dejectedly to the end of a half-block line. But scarcely five minutes after the opening curtain, the audience knew that its trouble had all been worthwhile. In the first U.S. appearance of its distinguished 223-year history, Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet was a hit.

Though the company is new to the U.S., American audiences have long been familiar with its graduates. In pre-Bolshevik days, the Kirov was St. Petersburg’s Maryinsky company, fountainhead of Western ballet. In graceful profusion, it produced the dancers Nijinsky and Pavlova, the choreographer Fokine, the impresario Diaghilev. Its demanding, perfectionist teachers seeded the world’s great troupes with their students: Galina Ulanova went on from St. Petersburg to her triumphs with Moscow’s Bolshoi, and Choreographer George Balanchine used his Maryinsky training to reshape the entire U.S. ballet scene.

Out of the Shadows. Overshadowed by its better known rival from Moscow, the Kirov itself had never made it across the Atlantic. Now, after a six-week success in Paris (where one dancer, Rudolf Nureyev, bolted from guards and won political asylum) and London, the Kirov is making its North American debut with a twelveweek, eight-city, cross-continent tour.

Last week the Kirov led with its ace, Tchaikovsky’s fluid, graceful Swan Lake. If the costumes were a trifle tacky, Simon Virsaladze’s sets were superb: subtle, misty shadings of grey, blue and green bathed in a ghostly aquamarine light to evoke the haunting, elusive beauty of the lake and its enchanted bird-women. But it was the dancing that the audience came to see, and the dancing overshadowed everything else. Before the performance was well under way, a lithe, vivacious ballerina named Alia Sizova stopped the show with her lyrical dancing in the pas de trois of Act I. Sweltering balletomanes interrupted a dozen more times to applaud Alexander Pavlovsky’s nimble jester, the ethereal cygnets of Act II, the despairing swans of the finale. In the difficult dual role of Odette-Odile, Ballerina Inna Zubkovskaya was an airy Swan Queen and a menacing Black Swan; when the cast changed for the second night’s performance, Ballerina Kaleria Fedicheva proved the better actress, and possibly the better dancer. She dared the famous 32 jouettes en tournant (whipping spins) that Zubkovskaya omitted for a less spectacular series of swift traveling turns.

Three nights after the Kirov’s debut, Sizova stopped the show again with Yuri Soloviev in a wildly exuberant pas de deux from Marius Petipa’s Corsair, part of a program of excerpts that the troupe brought off with virtuosity and vigor.

While the Kirov has no Ulanova, it boasts half a dozen ballerinas who can bring off such strenuous lead roles with supple ease. But conscious of its role as the defender of 19th century classical tradition, the company plays down its stars to emphasize its superb corps de ballet, whose girls rival the Rockettes in beauty as well as precision.

No Frills. For balletomanes who know the Bolshoi, the Kirov offers a striking contrast. Where the Bolshoi is flamboyant, dramatic and unabashedly fond of popular acclaim, the Kirov is precise, understated, a trifle aristocratic. The Bolshoi’s prima ballerina may dash the length of the stage to leap into Prince Siegfried’s arms with breathtaking drama in the Black Swan pas de deux of Swan Lake; Zubkovskaya takes a few brief steps and makes the leap with a rippling grace that is equally breathtaking. The Kirov’s tempo is more often a stately adagio than a flashy presto, and the spectacular is always shunned for the stylistic. But as the visitors spin through their tour, audiences from Manhattan and Montreal to San Francisco and Los Angeles are likely to continue queueing up at the box office.