In 1991 the Kirov reverted to its pre-Revolutionary title - the Mariinsky - for domestic use, and the ballet company in particular looked as if it might be hell-bent on denying its Soviet past. The troupe's current reputation certainly rests on the tutus and tiaras of its 19th-century repertory, and on recent western imports. Yet the seven decades following 1917 were critical, not only in the maintenance of the Imperial heritage but in the production of vividly populist, if politically orthodox, new ballets.
Few of the latter have been shown in the west though, and one of the treats in the second of the Kirov's retrospective galas this week was to see a genuine classic of that era, Igor Belsky's Leningrad Symphony. Following the lead of Shostakovich's score, the ballet pays tribute to Leningrad's endurance of the appalling siege of 1941-44. The first movement shows the city's youth gearing up for war, its groups of grey-clad men and women massed in passages of clean-limbed jumps, fresh faced embraces, totemic marching and waving. The second movement - the ballet's finest - brings on a troop of brown-costumed enemies who don't so much fight the Russians as invade their space with lines of relentless dance. The Russians disperse, or cluster into beautifully wracked and grieving tableaux until the choreography dissipates into near stasis. Only at the end does a single Russian warrior return to spell hope for the city's future.
The effect could simply be heroism by numbers, except that Belsky's ear for his score is subtle and responsive, and within the predictable vocabulary of worker-ballet steps there is an inventive range. Unlike its peer piece in the gala, a duet from Jacobson's 1956 Spartacus, it looks like a true period work, rather than old-fashioned kitsch
George Balanchine fled Leningrad long before the second world war, and only recently have his works been admitted into the Kirov repertory. Yet while his Prodigal Son (1929) wasn't danced as well as Leningrad Symphony (Daria Pavlenko's Siren was a mimsy amateur when it came to seduction) their pairing made fascinating history. You could see how the radical experiments of the early Revolution, so influential on the stark symbolic groupings of Balanchine's youthful style, had just as evidently filtered down to Belsky.
It was dispiriting to see how glimpses of this era proved so much more exciting than those of the Kirov's latest choreographic talents Kirill Simonov and Alexei Ratmansky, whose extracts displayed much hyperactive and unfocused grabbing at gimmickry. They did not look like a vision that could take this great company forward into the 21st century.
