A love affair: the new-look Kirov has taken Balanchine's new wine but decanted it into their old Russian bottles.

America's love affair--well, actually it was the West's love affair--with St. Petersburg's Kirov Ballet started in 1961. The company was on a three-city tour that started in Paris--where it lost in transit a dancer called Rudolf Nureyev--continued to London, and ended in New York.

It was an astonishing company. Under the artistic directorship of Konstantin Sergeyev and his wife Natalia Dudinskaya, it contained the great Irina Kolpakova--one of the finest Auroras of the 20th century--Vladilen Semenov, Alla Osipenko, and Inna Zubkovskaya. There were the younger stars Alla Sizova, Natalia Makarova, Yuri Soloviev (in his way as remarkable as Nureyev), and Oleg Sokolov, as well as such character dancers as Anatoly Gridin and Alexander Livshitz.

The repertoire included The Sleeping Beauty, in which Kolpakova and Semenov laid claim to be one of the great classical partnerships, while Sizova and Soloviev flew ecstatically in the Blue Bird pas de deux; later, Sizova made her debut as Aurora. Another debut at Covent Garden that was destined for world fame was Makarova as Giselle. In Swan Lake the Odette-Odiles included a magnificent Zubkovskaya and a sinuous Osipenko.

The season had opened that June with Yuri Grigorovich's The Stone Flower (1957), which had been seen in New York three years earlier with the Bolshoi. With its choreographic fluency and skillful, un-Soviet use of dance imagery, the ballet announced a welcome new voice and vision on the Russian scene.

Yet perhaps the most interesting program was the mixed bill, which included the magnificent Shades scene from La Bayadere (never before seen in the West); some of the famed Leonid Jacobson miniatures; and a scene from Boris Fenster's Taras Bulba, with the male dancers led enthusiastically by Sokolov and Soloviev. The subsequent New York season had much the same repertoire, notably without The Stone Flower and with Fokine's Les Sylphides.

Looking over 47 years to this year's City Center season: What of the Kirov then and the Kirov now? That amplitude of classical grace seems if anything more refined (too refined, perhaps?) than ever. In 1961 I think the Kirov had reached a performing peak that is bound to occur in the ups and downs of any great company, particularly if you had thrown the young Nureyev in with the promising mix of Makarova, Sizova (who never actually fulfilled her promise), and Soloviev.

The repertoire was a different kettle of dance, or, if you like, a warhorse of another color. By the mid-'60s most of the Petipa-Ivanov classics, despite being danced with ineffable style, were choreographically distant from the superior originals as preserved in Stepanov notation and staged by Petipa's last assistant, Nikolai Sergeyev. Following trips to Russia, I felt such 20th-century works as The Path of Thunder by Konstantin Sergeyev (no relation), Jacobson's Land of Miracles, and Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasiliev's The Creation of the World had poor, if often brilliantly performed, choreography. With the appointment in 1977 of Oleg Vinogradov as director, Western choreographers were gradually introduced into the repertoire. So the ballets shown recently at City Center not only had a quota of Fokine and Balanchine, but also Harald Lander's Etudes and, surprisingly, a whole evening of William Forsythe.

As for the dancers, that early ensemble was probably superior to the present troupe. At City Center, the company was unable to stage its sumptuous full-evening works, so it concentrated on its 20th-century ballets. Apart from Chopiniana (Les Sylphides), which basically had been created on the company in 1908 and carefully preserved, the Fokine ballets were inaccurate in their text and shabby in their performance, culminating in a laughable version of Scheherazade, where only valiant rear-guard actions by both reigning divas, Uliana Lopatkina and Diana Vishneva, as Zobeide, avoided total collapse.

The Balanchine program of Serenade, "Rubies" from Jewels, and Ballet Imperial was very stylishly danced by four different casts, but in slightly the wrong style. Balanchine is not Petipa-Ivanov. His style is in a personal dialect of a very similar language. In effect, Balanchine was pressing new wine from the grapes of the vineyards of the old Russian school and pouring it into his new Western bottles. The new-look Kirov has taken Balanchine's new wine but decanted it into their old Russian bottles. It dances Ballet Imperial as if it were The Sleeping Beauty, and it dances Lander's Etudes as if it were an actual classroom.

The oddest thing about the Kirov's 20th-century repertoire was that the company seemed most at home in the dislocated modernism and "cool" attitude of William Forsythe. As we say in the U.S., Go figure!

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes also covers dance and theater for the New York Post.