AT MUSIC CENTER : SEMENYAKA AND MUKHAMEDOV IN BOLSHOI ‘GISELLE’

It should have been the performance of the season. Or at least the cast of the season.

Friday, for its third outing with “Giselle” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Bolshoi Ballet promised a really dazzling trio of principals.

Ludmila Semenyaka--the most polished, most individual and most authoritative of active Bolshoi ballerinas--would dance the title role.

Irek Mukhamedov--the most charismatic, most flamboyant, most athletic of Bolshoi heroes--would dance Albrecht.

Maria Bilova--the strongest, most compelling of the Bolshoi’s seconda donnas--would dance the Queen of the Wilis.

With artists such as these, the aficionados reasoned, even the narrative and stylistic vagaries of Yuri Grigorovich’s new production would seem insignificant.

No such luck.

Perhaps, with the grueling American tour drawing to a close, everyone was tired. Perhaps the artists in question do not happen to find these roles wholly congenial. Perhaps the Grigorovich staging inhibits the personalities in question. Perhaps everyone was simply having an off-night--that happens even in the best of balletic families.

Perhaps it was all of the above. In any case, an air of disappointment lingered over the performance like a stubborn cloud of smog.

That does not mean the evening was bereft of fine dancing and interesting detail. There were felicitous moments, many of them. But they just didn’t connect. One left the Music Center dry-eyed and frustrated.

Semenyaka steadfastly refused to make Giselle a vulnerable, pathetic child. Even when striking artful girlish poses, she remained sophisticated, knowing, even calculating.

Responding to Albrecht’s knock, she emerged from the house, hesitated on the threshold, flashed a starry smile and embarked on an seductive game of peek-a-boo. Forget the breathless innocence.

Where other Giselles are chronically demure, she was terminally kittenish.

Where others exude overwhelming gratitude upon the receipt of Bathilde’s generous gift, she mustered only a casual smile.

“Gee, thanks,” she seemed to say. “This little necklace will go nicely with my silver dress.”

In the mad scene Semenyaka literally, and figuratively, declined to let her hair down. She executed the choreography with perfectly chiseled perfection, dashed about the stage with uncanny lightness and speed, mocked with pretty delirium the steps that had previously conveyed rapture. Still, not much happened.

In Act Two, she reduced Giselle-as-Wili to a lovely, aloof abstraction. Although she may have smudged a few technical points, one had to admire the classical purity of her style, her pristine line, her magnetic presence. One also had to regret the absence of enduring poignancy and the mere sketching of tragedy.

No one expected Mukhamedov to personify selfless nobility. Everyone expected him to gobble up the stage in his final, frenzied bravura variation. Everyone was wrong.

Although he jumped higher than most Albrechts can, and exerted more energy, he gave a performance that was subdued to a fault.

In the first act, he partnered Semenyaka with gentlemanly sympathy (although he could not match her soft landings). Even though he exuded generalized ardor, he did little to define the Count’s conflicting emotions.

In the second act, he conveyed generalized sorrow. He did little, however, to define the character’s ultimate desperation and spiritual growth.

Finally, in the variation that puts every Albrecht to the pyrotechnical test, Mukhamedov concentrated on simple power. He left out the superhuman feats and special effects. He muted the sparks. He ended the passage kneeling on the floor rather than sprawling on it--his immediate predecessors in the role preferred total collapse--and, unlike his colleagues, he didn’t break the mood with a bow to the fans.

This is one matinee idol who seems to have more taste than ego. On this occasion and in this context, unfortunately, his restraint seemed a miscalculation. One prefers to remember him flexing his muscles in “The Golden Age” or bounding with nonchalant elegance through “Don Quixote.”

Bilova is not as icy, as imperious or as easily airborne as the great Myrtas of recent memory (Deanne Bergsma of the Royal Ballet, Rosario Suarez of the Cuban Ballet and Martine van Hamel of American Ballet Theatre spring to mind). Nevertheless, her performance of Grigorovich’s somewhat abridged version of the traditional choreography was usually poised, always commanding.

Succeeding Bilova in the lengthy peasant pas de deux (where she had been oddly miscast), Marina Nudga offered a welcome change. She was pert, fleet and almost impervious to the clumsy partnering of Alexei Lazarev.