BALLET REVIEW : ‘Swan Lake’ in Pasadena by Soviet Troupe

There was a time when you could promise them anything, so long as you gave them “Swan Lake.”

No more.

Either audiences have grown more sophisticated and selective or Rothbart’s spell has worn off. Whatever the case, the Moscow Classical Ballet, which opened its Pasadena engagement Tuesday at Civic Auditorium with the feathery perennial, played to roughly half a house.

Nor did the starry presence of Nadezhda Pavlova matter a jot. Remember her?

She danced here nine years ago with her then-husband Vyacheslav Gordeyev in the Bolshoi Ballet. They were the company’s golden couple. But within a short pre- Glasnost time they suffered banishment and divorced. She was said to have gained weight and dropped out. He turned up in Pasadena last year as director and principal dancer of the Moscow Ballet, another young Soviet company.

The strategy--adding a little bit of Bolshoi to these less illustrious troupes--can work at the box office. But it didn’t this time. Maybe those who stayed away in droves knew something.

For this production of “Swan Lake” looked like the ghost of old-fashioned realism, minus tastefulness. Despite Tim Goodchild’s extravagant designs--costumes with real leather, beaded satin and swan feathers, mountains of them--the overall effect was that of a warehouse raid.

Nothing seemed coordinated. And the glitz element--a spangled front curtain that would look at home in Las Vegas and a lakeside setting of dark iridescent icicles, smoke and flying feathers--was something out of a Ralph Bakshi cartoon. When Balanchine did stalactites and glitter, it somehow had more style.

As for the choreography, helped along by the venerable Asaf Messerer and company directors Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasiliov, it restored some of Tchaikovsky’s original music rarely heard except on recordings. But conductor Pavel Salnikov had all he could do to make his pickup orchestra sound as if it was not sight-reading the score.

That offered small comfort to Pavlova, who arrived from Moscow on Monday and looked as if she’d never had so much as a rehearsal with her Siegfried, or the orchestra, having to run offstage several times sans music.

For the record, she still looks and moves like a long-limbed, turned-out textbook ideal. Her Odette has a regal breadth through the back. She phrases with supreme musicality. She indulges no exaggerated extensions, despite a suppleness that would permit such display. With her gorgeous placement and line, she manages to depict swan-liness without the usual orgy of undulations.

But she did the unthinkable. In the middle of her Act II variation, she fell--after two shaky open balances on pointe . And she seemed fatally vacant throughout. No pathos as Odette. No fire as Odile. For fouette fans, she also might have disappointed by omitting them altogether, while Vladimir Mala-khov, her Siegfried, usurped the leg-whipping music for a series of air turns.

Poor guy. Pavlova never once looked him in the eye and their partnering conveyed unfamiliarity. But he managed a princely demeanor, in the callow-effete tradition.

Valery Trofimchuk, as Rothbart, got to partner the captive creature also, in a ridiculously oversized feather coat that nearly tripped her. Ilgiz Galimullin brought caractere muscularity to his bounding Jester and Igor Terentiev, an attractively leggy Benno, polished off a round of entrechat-six.

The troupe gives its final “Swan Lake” tonight, with three performances of “Romeo and Juliet” scheduled for this weekend.