Kirov’s second cast: It’s love over lust

If the Kirov Ballet’s opening night leads in “Scheherazade” emphasized pure, delirious lust, two new principals brought implications of forbidden love to the Thursday performance of Mikhail Fokine’s one-act 1910 dance drama at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

As an adulterous sultana and her highflying slave, Irma Nioradze and Danila Korsuntsev pawed one another passionately, looked utterly at home in Fokine’s contorted, neo-Oriental style and forged a tragic bond long before she reached out to him at the moment of his death. Nioradze also brooded stunningly, and the clarity of Korsuntsev’s leaps and turns would have been remarkable even if they hadn’t been so numerous.

In Fokine’s neo-Romantic “Chopiniana,” Anton Korsakov danced the Poet with a light, airy freedom, except for fleeting instances of effortful partnering. The Prelude solo found long-limbed Daria Sukhorukova evincing great gestural delicacy and the ability to make every sustained balance into a haunting reverie.

The lone newcomer among previously reviewed principals in Fokine’s “The Firebird,” Andrey Yakovlev partnered reliably and gave the Tsarevich a distinctively bluff heartiness, as if an ordinary guy had wandered into the ballet’s enchanted forest unprepared for either its seductions or its dangers. Mikhail Agrest again conducted.