The Kirov is a great ballet company because it has so many terrific dancers, but it doesn’t always know what to do with them. The dancers—here for a three-week season, just ended, at the City Center—were under a handicap: The stage is so much smaller than their own, in St. Petersburg, that the company’s classical works in particular looked cramped and unhappy.  read more »

The first time the Kirov ballet was seen in America was on Sept. 11, 1961. The ballet was Swan Lake. The ballerina was Inna Zubkovskaya. The place was the old Met, on what must have been one of the hottest nights of the year, and there was no air-conditioning. As I remember it, our secretary of state and the Russian ambassador were sitting in the center box with their dinner jackets off, trying to look dignified as they melted, and the curtain was extremely late—Zubkovskaya, we later heard, was fainting from the heat backstage.  read more »