One of the more dubious theories touted around the obsessive world of balletomania is that, when it comes to musicality, British dancers can be relied upon to hit the beat, whereas American dancers tend to be a step ahead of it and the Russians have made a speciality of being a step or two behind everyone else.
Indeed, British audiences have long been curiously entranced by the unfamiliar, sometimes bizarre, often irritating musical habits in which some Russian dancers serially indulge. And yet, watching the Bolshoi in Don Quixote - the final ballet in a four-week season at the Coliseum - you realise that the company's brand of musicality is not just about a conductor's skill in pacing a score to fit and manage the musical quirks of individual dancers. What you witness is a deep and intractable cultural difference in the whole business of dancing: the Russians - or, at least, the Bolshoi - move with a foreign accent and the patterns of intonation in their phrasing can fascinate, baffle, infuriate and delight.
Although Alexei Fadeyechev's new production received its Moscow premiere just over a month ago, the dancers look inordinately at home in it, shaping the ballet as though they've found a way of falling in love with it anew. No trace here of the combination of disdain, boredom and efficiency sometimes apparent in other old repertory warhorses. The female corps has seldom looked better - the vision scene, populated by otherworldly dryads in peach and lemon-hazed tutus, transports you to the romantic core of the Don's dreams - but it is Nina Ananiashvili's Kitri and, eventually, Andrei Uvarov's Basil who most effectively restore the lost faith in the Bolshoi which has so marred this London season.
Ananiashvili, already one of the company's biggest stars in the 80s, has matured into a dancer of phenomenal power and confidence, her gifts now consolidated in a fashion that you could never have guessed at from the softer, more voluptuous manner of her dancing a decade ago. Her now brisk, winningly direct style was honed, perhaps, by her time with American Ballet Theatre over the past six years.
From her first entrance, Ananiashvili hurls herself into the role of Kitri with the technical assurance of a ballerina who can forget about technique and concentrate on pursuing and enjoying ever greater challenges on stage. Unfazed by the cracking pace at which conductor Alexander Sotnikov takes Minkus's score, Ananiashvili sets new records for speed which enhance, rather than detract from, Kitri's youthful impetuousness.
As Basil, Kitri's barber lover, Andrei Uvarov takes slightly longer to look entirely comfortable and, at first, offers only a tantalising foretaste of his true capabilities. A convincingly masculine character, he also stands apart from the ballet's ensemble of toreadors who are as entertainingly camp as their stick-on sideburns.
