KIROV BALLET : PREMIERE OF MIXED BILL AT SHRINE

With very few major exceptions, the first four performances in the Kirov Ballet engagement at Shrine Auditorium last week were notable more for collective achievements than individual brilliance.

The production values for “Swan Lake” reflected both unstinting opulence and meticulous attention to detail. Under conductor Evgeny Kolobov, the locally recruited orchestra revealed surprising passion and precision. Finally, the legendary Kirov woman’s corps revealed uncanny unanimity of impulse and transparency of style.

All that changed radically on Sunday with the North American premiere of a three-part mixed bill of classics orginally created for the company in czarist St. Petersburg.

Production values ranged from bare-but-functional to tattered-and-tacky. Under conductor Victor Fedotov, the orchestra now sounded merely like a tinny, underrehearsed pit band--especially in the reorchestrated Chopin of “Les Sylphides” (a k a “Chopiniana”).

Finally, many, many members of the vaunted woman’s corps wobbled alarmingly in the sustained balances of the vision scene from “La Bayadere.” In one transitional passage, where dancers previously deployed in long lines across the stage quickly formed into short rows from front to back, one woman who should have gone to the third row ran, by mistake, to the second--and returned after her 31 colleagues were already in place.

But though collaborative endeavor mostly faltered, individual achievements triumphed. In the suite from “Paquita,” at the end of the evening, these triumphs came so fast, so often, so unexpectedly that they added up to nothing less than the blazing affirmation of Kirov starpower that “Swan Lake” had largely failed to provide.

American Ballet Theatre and Dance Theatre of Harlem each stage divertissements from “Paquita” (in different versions). But neither company includes more than a small portion of the extended showpiece the Kirov extracted from Marius Petipa’s 1881 two-act ballet to music by Minkus.

Besides the scintillating pas de deux (always staged), the Kirov offered a formal pas de trois (less familiar) and five more women’s solos that, because of costume colors and decorations, might be called the gold, silver, emerald, sapphire and ruby variations. Certainly each of them refracted another facet of ballerina technique.

Here was Lubov Kunakova (the Saturday Odette-Odile), warm, refined and lyrically graceful; Tatiana Terekhova (unidentified in the house program) in a sensational jumping/turning display; Elena Evteyeva displaying an effortless control she’d lacked earlier in the Pavlova role of “Les Sylphides.”

Among the less celebrated participants, Zhanna Ayupova danced with the fleet exactitude she had shown in the pas de trois from “Swan Lake” and Tamara Mirhzoyan sparkled in the pixieish solo that Mikhail Baryshnikov has adapted for his “Don Quixote.”

In the trio, two Irinas--Chistiakova and Sitnikova--flew through two springy, soubrettish solos and Aleksander Lunev (identified on the program sheet as Sergei Vikharev) calmly produced the highest elevation, the swiftest batterie , the softest landings imaginable.

In the pas de deux, Marat Daukayev (the Friday Siegfried) again proved himself terminally subdued and of no use on the ground--but a model of dynamic agility in the air.

Presiding over this cornucopia of Kirov classicism with the good humor of a hostess at a family party, Olga Chenchikova (the Thursday Odette-Odile) unleashed an arsenal of furioso fouettes and other high-voltage feats of propulsion or perfect control that made “Paquita” her personal vehicle.

There is no one like her. Chenchikova commands state-of-the-art technical glitter without any steel-toe coldness or mannerism. At every moment she exudes the wholehearted physical/emotional generosity that used to be synonymous with Russian ballet.

That generosity also marked Konstantin Zaklinsky’s hot, forceful performance as Solor in Petipa’s “La Bayadere” (to more Minkus), opposite Galina Mezentseva’s brittle, weirdly mannered Nikiya. (We know Nikiya is supposed to be dead in the “Shades” scene--but blind ?)

Except for her powerful pique turns--soon outclassed by Chenchikova’s in “Paquita”--the technique that Mezentseva brought to “La Bayadere” remained spotty, far below current Anglo-American standards in this ballet.

The two Irinas were paired again as fleet subsidiary shades, joined by Olga Likhovskaya, a correct but juiceless dancer who had already reduced the evanescent “Prelude” in Mikhail Fokine’s “Les Sylphides” to stiff, formal poses.

From its flat lighting to its anemic arm movement, the Kirov “Sylphides” was dead wrong--misconceived in terms of atmosphere and danced in the wrong style as well. Fokine had intended a neo-Romantic reverie--a ballet based on the airy French classicism of the early 19th Century. In addition, his ballet incorporated innovations in plastique and port de bras that had recently been developed by Isadora Duncan.

The Kirov performance Sunday ignored the unique expressive style that Fokine created and substituted the more chiseled classical look of “Swan Lake” and “La Bayadere.” Even on its own perverse terms, however, the production failed, for the dancing by Evteyeva, Likhovskaya, Sitnikova, Vikharev and the corps conveyed much more strain than conviction.

In most productions of “Les Sylphides,” the backdrop depicts a dark, secluded forest near a ruin. In the Kirov staging, Igor Ivanov’s painted landscape was bright and unbroken by any structure--only the choreography lay in ruins.