Kirov Ballet Makes High-Flying Magic With ‘Giselle’

Quite apart from its flying Wilis in Act 2, the Kirov Ballet spent so much time in the air during its Thursday performance of “Giselle” at the Metropolitan Opera House that you kept looking for wings on the backs of even those dancers cast as earthbound mortals. Everyone jumped so often, so lightly, so effortlessly, that the whole production gained a soaring buoyancy: classical dancing at its most magically wind-borne.

Although “Giselle” dates from 1841, the ballet survives only in a version derived from what Marius Petipa rechoreographed in St. Petersburg during the 1880s. Instead of attempting to reconnect it to early Romantic style--as National Ballet of Cuba has done so brilliantly--the Kirov dances the ballet in the Imperial Russian style forged by Petipa: a style further modified by the familiar priorities of the Soviet era. Mime has been heavily pruned, for instance, and emotion is not so much portrayed as distilled in dancing.

If the result often seems less a story ballet than a nearly abstract dance-meditation, the Kirov’s supreme refinement makes its approach deeply thrilling. And the emphasis on a new generation of dancers evident throughout the two-week Met season gives the choreography unexpected freshness. Truly, this is a company on the verge of glorious rebirth, with such young stars as Diana Vishneva already inspiring rapturous ovations.

In Act 1, Vishneva made a sweet, mercurial Giselle, dancing with a ravishing delicacy and great expressive detail. In tearing the petals of the daisy in the he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not passage, she seemed to be praying to the flower for the answer she needed, already helplessly in love despite doubts that would come crashing back upon her in the Mad Scene. This Giselle didn’t need extensive proof of Albrecht’s betrayal; her madness represented one last denial of a truth she’d sensed all along.

With amazing technical surety, Vishneva danced every scene in Act 2 as one unbroken passage, entrance-to-exit: the flow of time after death perfectly embodied in her sustained, contemplative lyricism. No great emotional fireworks--in keeping with the production’s classical reserve--but plenty of feeling underneath and many more details to savor, among them her fabulous high-speed backward whirling after Myrta summoned her from the grave.

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In November, Vishneva is scheduled to dance opposite Farouk Ruzimatov at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts--and Ruzimatov was scheduled to be her Albrecht on Thursday. But injury led to the substitution of Kirov soloist Andrian Fadeyev: cute rather than handsome, reliable rather than exciting, the product of a great school rather than an artist of distinction at this juncture of his career.

Dancing in the hardest, and noisiest, pointe shoes since Paloma Herrera’s, an icy Tatiana Amosova gave Myrta maximum thrust, with her two lieutenants played by fast-rising major artists: Veronica Part and Daria Pavlenko. Ilya Kuznetsov made a virile Hilarion, and the peasant pas de deux united the meticulous Irina Zhelonkina with the fleet Viacheslav Samodurov. The Wilis-corps? Sublime, whirling Hilarion to death with enormous force but not a finger out of place.

Conductor Boris Gruzin commanded faster tempos than are traditional in Russian stagings, but the Kirov Ballet Orchestra responded capably. And the sumptuous sets and costumes by (respectively) Igor Ivanov and Irene Press looked picture perfect on the Met stage as lit by Mikhail Federov and Vladimir Lukasevich.

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* The Kirov Ballet dances in New York through July 10 at the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center. $15-$80. (212) 362-6000.