THE BOLSHOI ON HOME VIDEO: 1953-1987

Watching nearly 35 years of Bolshoi Ballet performances on home video (as a kind of overture to the company’s three-week season at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion starting Tuesday), one quickly confirms that the potent Bolshoi mystique has always belonged to dancers rather than choreographers.

Indeed, transcending choreography is part of that mystique, part of the greatness that generations of Bolshoi dancers have reached in disreputable revisions of the 19th-Century classics and even less palatable contemporary works.

Paradoxically, such transcendence is achieved through total commitment: the dancers relishing every awful moment of their worst roles until their technical daring and wholehearted generosity as performers outweighs every other consideration. Dance Theatre of Harlem understands the secret, but otherwise it seems exclusively a Moscow phenomenon.

No dance company in the world has been filmed and videotaped as extensively as the Bolshoi, and much of this living performance library has been marketed for home viewing.

Thus, tape by tape, decade by decade, you can watch the company devalue its once-supreme character-dance skills in favor of a restrictive home-grown form of modernism.

You can follow Ekaterina Maximova as she develops from the exquisite embodiment of spring in “Cinderella” (1961) into the radiant maturity of “Anyuta” (1982).

You can even see Bolshoi works never judged suitable for export and hear how Moscow audiences responded to them.

Available cassettes are briefly described and evaluated below. In truth, however, the only Bolshoi videotape you may really need is the mixed bill on Home Vision called “An Evening With the Bolshoi,” a two-hour summary of the company’s prowess, taped last year in London.

Muscles bulging and veins popping, Irek Mukhamedov proves himself the unrivaled king of the air in Act II of Yuri Grigorovich’s “Spartacus.” At once faster and daintier than any other Kitri, Ludmila Semenyaka claims the pas de deux from “Don Quixote” as her own. In a silken performance of the “Black Swan” pas de deux, Alexei Fadeyechev (son of the Bolshoi danseur noble Nicolai Fadeyechev) suavely upholds the family honor.

There’s more: a highlight from “The Golden Age” (though that may be a contradiction in terms), and a complete performance of “Les Sylphides” (a.k.a “Chopiniana”), though its style is closer to “Swan Lake” than Mikhail Fokine intended, the sections are in the wrong order and the TV cameras render stage moonlight as a dull monochrome.

You’ll even find a relic of the pre-Grigorovich Bolshoi: “Spring Waters,” a wildly acrobatic pas de deux that looks more like an Olympic event than classical dancing. Souvenir hunters, seek no further.

BUYER’S GUIDE: From the mid-’60s until stage performances were recorded directly on videotape a decade later, wide-screen processes were used by Soviet motion picture directors on their ballet projects. These films are problematic on television. Some video companies ignore the issue, others favor “pan and scan” (optically centering on a subject within the original frame) or “letterboxing” (reproducing the film in its proper rectangular proportions with black bands at the top and bottom of the TV screen).

A few Corinth releases reveal a dubious new approach: minimal letterboxing combined with some optical “squeezing” of the image horizontally. The resulting distortion makes all Bolshoi dancers tall and slender with oval faces--halfway between the proportions of Balanchine dancers and those of the alien in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Some of the tapes listed below have been issued by more than one company--and a few of those companies have changed their names. Consequently, you may find identical performances in different editions.

Moreover, the list doesn’t include deleted titles that may still be in some stores (the “Giselle” and “Romeo and Juliet” performances with Bessmertnova and Mikhail Lavrovsky, for instance, previously available from CBS/Fox). Deviations from the original titles of ballets or films are indicated with parentheses.

THE 1950s

Stars of the Russian Ballet. VAI: $59.95. Galina Ulanova, Maya Plisetskaya, Vakhtang Chabukiani. Includes drastically abridged versions of “Swan Lake,” “Fountain of Bakhchisarai” and “Flames of Paris.” 80 minutes. 1953. Enlisting Bolshoi and Kirov forces, this studio feature captures the spirituality of the mature Ulanova (Maria in “Fountain,” Odette) and the force of the young Plisetskaya (Zarema in “Fountain”) in full bloom. It was filmed years before the company’s legendary first visits to London (‘56) and New York (‘59) and showcases the character vigor and devil-may-care virtuosity that helped re-invigorate European and American ballet.

Romeo and Juliet (L. Lavrovsky/Prokofiev). VAI: $64.95. Ulanova, Yuri Zhandov. 95 minutes. 1954. The most spectacular ballet film ever made--with dazzling production values and enormous vitality. Unfortunately, it is overloaded with mime and pageantry--the actual dancing starts late and ends early--but Ulanova’s portrayal of Juliet is still unsurpassed in its purity and conviction. Because intrusive narration has now been removed from the sound track, the video version is superior to the original theatrical film.

Swan Lake (Gorsky-Messerer/Tchaikovsky). VAI: $59.95. Plisetskaya, N. Fadeyechev. 81 minutes. 1957. Crudely edited to (at times) near-incoherence, this film record of a stage performance comes complete with mini-intermissions and shots of the audience watching passages we never see. At 31, Plisetskaya dances with incomparable strength and control--and no suggestion of the distortions in tempo and style that she imposed on the ballet in later years. Fadeyechev is an ideal partner.

THE 1960s

Cinderella (Zakharov/Prokofiev). International Historic Films: $55. Raisa Struchkova, Gennadi Lediakh. 81 minutes. 1961. This lavish studio film preserves the original choreography to Prokofiev’s score--choreography underrated in the Soviet Union (possibly because of its obvious debt to Marius Petipa) and largely unknown elsewhere. A pity, since many of the narrative and stylistic problems plaguing later versions are easily resolved here. A naively charming production overall, with Struchkova (Cinderella) blazing through the highly sophisticated technical challenges.

The Little Humpbacked Horse (Radunsky/Shchedrin). Corinth: $59.95. Plisetskaya, Vladimir Vasiliev. 85 minutes. 1961. With its rambling, picaresque folk tale told in mime, and formal divertissements to show off the company, this uneven, fitfully diverting sound-stage project exploits the great Bolshoi character-dance tradition. Choreographer Radunsky sets the style as a fat, stupid king, but the young Vasiliev (already phenomenal) and the brilliant Plisetskaya also get into the comic spirit.

Plisetskaya Dances. VAI: $59.95. Includes excerpts from “Romeo and Juliet,” “Don Quixote,” “Spartacus,” “Sleeping Beauty” and other works. Black-and-white. 70 minutes. 1964. This roughly edited jumble of documentary, interview and performance footage (some of it dark and fuzzy) is redeemed by its raison d’etre : Plisetskaya at the height of her powers. A fabulous precis of all the values that the old Bolshoi represented.

Bolshoi Ballet (‘67). Kultur: $59.95. Struchkova, Alla Osipenko, Yaroslav Sekh. Includes “Paganini,” “Bolero,” “Ravel Waltzes,” “The Dying Swan” and other works. 90 minutes. 1967. Largely a compendium of kitsch awkwardly transferred from its wide-screen format to home video, this quasi-documentary with studio-filmed dance segments is valuable for early glimpses of future Bolshoi luminaries (including Bessmertnova and Mikhail Lavrovsky) and the authoritative character dancing.

THE 1970S

Carmen (Suite) (Alonso/Shchedrin). VAI: $59.95. Plisetskaya, N. Fadeyechev. Also includes “The Dying Swan,” a “Raymonda” excerpt and “Bach Prelude.” 73 minutes. 1973. There are glints of her former greatness, but Plisetskaya here (and hereafter) is mostly mired in trash, rising above it through force of personality and by exaggerating those technical resources still available to her. A disheartening, cult-of-personality studio feature.

Anna Karenina (Plisetskaya/ Shchedrin). Corinth: $59.95. Plisetskaya, Alexander Godunov. 81 minutes. 1974. A muddled dance drama based on Tolstoy, this studio feature finds Plisetskaya looking glamorous in gowns by Pierre Cardin. However you can scarcely see Godunov dance at all, since he’s usually wearing black trousers against black backgrounds. (In the darkest shots, he looks like a hand puppet.) Worth enduring only for a few bravura passages--especially Plisetskaya’s hair-raising series of 20 jetes (in slow motion) near the end.

Spartacus (Grigorovich/Khachaturian). Corinth: $59.95. Bessmertnova, Vasiliev. 95 minutes. 1977. With its Nazified Roman legions and suffering crypto-Slavic slaves, this flamboyant, quasi-historical depiction of revolution against tyranny became Grigorovich’s greatest success, the icon of new-Bolshoi muscle. The heroic Vasiliev heads a definitive cast in this studio feature.

Ivan the Terrible (Grigorovich/Prokofiev). Corinth: $59.95. Bessmertnova, Yuri Vladimirov. 91 minutes. 1977. Russian mannerism at its most feverish and claustrophobic. Even the optical squeezing adds to the hypnotic unreality of this studio feature. The screen swims with delirious overlapping images of bells, ropes and rampaging boyars. Vladimirov is a crude actor-dancer, but he’s perfectly cast in the title role of this stupendously overwrought historical epic.

The Nutcracker (Grigorovich/Tchaikovsky). CBS/Fox: $49.98. Nadezhda Pavlova, Vyacheslav Gordeyev. 87 minutes. 1978. Grigorovich tries to unify and deepen the original plot but emerges with a murky, downbeat tale padded with wan divertissements . Vasiliev and Maximova (called “Ekateri Mamimova” on the tape box and “Katherina Maksimova” in the screen credits) dance the first half of this live performance but, due to his injury, are replaced in Act II by Gordeyev and Pavlova--great artists otherwise unrepresented on American home video. Vladimir Levashev is a fine Drosselmeyer.

THE 1980s

Les Sylphides (Chopiniana) (Fokine/Chopin). V.I.E.W.: $39.95. Bessmertnova, Alexander Bogatyrev. 34 minutes. 1980. In this studio production, Fokine’s neo-Romantic reverie is beautifully played, danced and photographed--and the sections are presented in the correct order (unlike the live performance taped six years later for Home Vision). Bessmertnova is seen at her most soulful and lyrically pure.

Anyuta (Vasiliev/Gavrilin). Kultur: $59.95. Maximova, Gali Abaidulov. 68 minutes. 1982. Not an official Bolshoi production, this small-scale, studio-made Chekhov adaptation reaffirms the discarded old-Bolshoi character virtues. Atmospheric, bittersweet, full of deft portrayals (including one by Vasiliev himself in a subsidiary part), “Anyuta” is a work of consistent excellence. And, in the title role (which combines Cinderella with Anna Karenina), Maximova is enchanting.

Macbeth (Vasiliev/Molchanov). Kultur: $59.95. A. Fadeyechev, Nina Timofeyeva. 105 minutes. 1984. Taped in live performance (with supplemental video effects), this ballet seems at first just a neo-Grigorovich fusion of macho combat dances and melodramatic brooding, a la “Ivan the Terrible.” Eventually, though, Vasiliev abandons precedent--and Shakespeare--for an intimate look at Macbeth and his lady wrestling with their personal demons. Uneven but often intriguing, with strong dancing from the strangely mismatched principals.

Spartacus (Grigorovich/Khachaturian). HBO Video: $39.95. Bessmertnova, Mukhamedov. 130 minutes. 1984. Longer than the 1977 film, free of optical squeeze and with a better-recorded sound track, this live performance also boasts the high-flying Mukhamedov: magnificent in the role that made him a Bolshoi star. Otherwise, however, the casting/performances are inferior.

(The Ultimate) Swan Lake (Grigorovich/Tchaikovsky). Kultur: $59.95. Bessmertnova, Bogatyrev. 126 minutes. 1984. (Special edition, available by mail or telephone from Stolichnaya: $19.95, plus $3 shipping fee.)

New-Bolshoi classicism, a la Grigorovich: a 19th-Century masterpiece with nearly all mime and character dancing eliminated and, with it, the work’s intended stylistic contrasts and emotional resonance. Elegant but devitalized dancing (Bessmertnova is past her prime and Bogatyrev was never a virtuoso) and fine sound recording.

In this regard, the new, low-priced “vodka edition” (which begins with a 70-second Stolichnaya commercial) is preferable: It is even better recorded, restores a small cut and lacks the voice-over comments by Gene Kelly that formerly ran on top of the music.

An Evening With the Bolshoi. Home Vision: $39.95. Bessmertnova, A. Fadeyechev, Semenyaka. Includes “Les Sylphides,” “Spring Waters,” plus excerpts from “Spartacus,” “The Golden Age” and four Petipa ballets. 120 minutes. 1986. See introduction.

The Golden Age (Grigorovich/Shostakovich). Home Vision: $39.95. Bessmertnova, Mukhamedov. 112 minutes. 1987. With its end-of-the-line creative vapidity buoyed by state-of-the-art company virtuosity, this live performance perfectly illustrates the idea of Grigorovich gridlock: ostensibly new works that don’t move the Bolshoi forward.

After 211 years, it’s scandalous that the biggest dance ensemble on earth can’t find something more worthy for its aging prima ballerina and young aerial firebrand than this patchwork of formula-classicism, class conflict and showbiz camp. There have been worse ballets in the Bolshoi’s long history--Grigorovich’s own “Legend of Love” comes quickly to mind--but surely none emptier.