DANCE REVIEW : Bolshoi: An Exercise in Dichotomy : Veterans gave the company its class and rising artists gave it flash, but major dancers in their prime were missing from the program at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

“Stars of the Bolshoi Ballet” suffered from a curious generation gap, Monday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. Stars of the past dominated the performance--the opening of a four-night engagement. Stars of the future blazed with promise. But the present? The here and now? Not present, not here, not now.

Consider the extremes. At 52, company prima ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova still exemplified Bolshoi style at its purest, capitalizing on her strikingly long arms with their celebrated “weeping-willow” wrists. In Act II of “Swan Lake” (opposite the elegant Boris Efimov) and a duet from “The Golden Age” (opposite the sturdy Leonid Nikonov), she exuded her usual grave, high-Romantic stillness.

But her former quality of movement--its plush and aura--had declined into a thin, prosaic technical pragmatism. The once-magical bourrees lacked their remembered shimmer. Each turn looked hard-won. Only her projected poetic line reminded you of her greatness.

In contrast, her 20-year-old nephew, Mikhail Bessmertnov, attacked the “Pas d’Esclave” from “Le Corsaire” (opposite the majestic Marina Filippova) with reckless bravado, ignoring the niceties of classicism in his eagerness to share the thrill of its muscle-power. That’s Bolshoi style, too, and the Monday program exploited it to the fullest in an eight-part ballet-vaudeville ending the evening.

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Dancers long in the tooth alternating with those wet behind the ears: the dichotomy of “Stars of the Bolshoi,” 1993. Veterans such as Tatiana Bessmertnova (Natalia’s sister) and Mikhail Gabovich gave the program class. Rising artists such as Erika Luzina and Andrei Nikonov gave it flash. But where were major artists in their prime?

The closest, perhaps: Natalia Arkhipova and Anatoli Kucheruk in arguably the ultimate high-speed, hard-sell “Don Quixote” pas de deux anywhere--though scarcely the most stylish. Or maybe Alla Mikhalchenko, another distinctively hyper-extended Bolshoi ballerina often scheduled for U.S. tours but just as often missing locally due to injuries.

Opposite Leonid Nikonov in the waltz duet from “Chopiniana” (“Les Sylphides”), Mikhalchenko commanded both youthful energy and a mastery of what passes in Russia for Fokine style. That level of achievement might have qualified her as the big news of the engagement except that the unheralded Marina Kotova and Eduard Smirnov simply outdanced and out-charmed everyone else on the program.

In the “Flames of Paris” pas de deux, Kotova embodied classic Bolshoi gusto and generosity as she breezed through every technical challenge (including fouettes with one arm held motionless), smiling broadly.

Smirnov matched her warmth with a starry-eyed sweetness as he rigorously enforced the highest standards of classical placement (a rarity among the virtuoso males here) while surging through bravura directional gambits sharply and at imposing scale.

If this 22-year-old from Riga proved the discovery of the evening, other surprises were less agreeable--especially the use of taped music and seeing the once-mighty Bolshoi swan-corps reduced to just 15 (including demi-soloists and cygnets). “Stars of the Bolshoi” continues, with nightly changes of program, through Thursday.