In Finland, a Gift of Love.

The annual ballet festival in Mikkeli, Finland, was born of a young girl's dream and a husband's love. As a child growing up in Mikkeli, Ulla Savisalo cut out magazine pictures of Maya Plisetskaya and later attended a local ballet school. She dropped the class, but remained a ballet fan. When her husband, Hannu, asked her what she wanted as a present for their silver wedding anniversary in 1995, she replied that her dream was to bring Russian ballet to Mikkeli. The two entrepreneurs organized the festival, which has drawn worldwide attention. Julie Kent and Vladimir Malakhov from American Ballet Theatre took part in 1999, and Malakhov returned last September to the festival, which was named in his honor "Malakhov Classic and Modernist." He danced the role of James (with Zhanna Ayupova, prima ballerina of the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, as Effie) in La Sylphide, with Gediminas Taranda's Imperial Russian Ballet, and he also performed in Fokine's Chopiniana, Paquita and a pair of modern numbers, Kasian Goleizovsky's Narcise and Renato Zanella's Voyage. In these shorter works Malakhov shared the stage with Taranda's ballerinas Olga Pavlova, Irina Surneva and Elena Smoltsova, in a theater perfumed by the apples that filled tables in the lobby.