MAXIMOVA DANCES IN MOSCOW.

MOSCOW--A gala performance celebrating renowned ballerina Ekaterina Maximova's sixtieth birthday took place at the Bolshoi Theatre on February 1. Aside from an announcement over the intercom that Maximova had been awarded, by Presidential decree, the order "For Services to One's Country" (third degree), the evening was all dance.

A principal dancer at the Bolshoi Theatre, where she performed for more than thirty years, Maximova was equally successful in comic, lyrical, and dramatic parts. She retired from dancing in 1994 to become a ballet mistress and repetiteur, first for Moscow's Kremlin Ballet and later for the Bolshoi, where her husband, Vladimir Vasiliev, is now artistic director.

The first act of the gala evening (produced and staged by Vasiliev) included performances by the Bolshoi Theatre Ballet and Mime Ensemble in addition to three of Moscow's leading ballet companies (the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre, the State Theatre of Classical Ballet under the direction of Natalya Kasatkina and Vladimir Y. Vasilyov, and the Kremlin Ballet).

The Bolshoi Ballet's tribute consisted of excerpts and short works--many of which had been created for Maximova--including Yuri Grigorovich's Nutcracker; Kasyan Goleyzovsky's Mazurka; Vasiliev's Classical Pas de Deux, Biography of an Artist's Life, and Anyuta; and the grand pas de deux from Don Quixote. Svetlana Lunkina and Anastasia Volchkova, both soloists at the Bolshoi and students of Maximova, were among the performers. The audience also saw film clips from the late 1950s of Maximova at ballet school and of her first roles in the theater.

Maximova announced five years ago that she would never dance onstage again. When the audience noticed her, a diminutive figure in a black evening dress behind the tall ballerinas in pink tutus in Prologue, there was a storm of applause and a standing ovation.

The high point of the gala, however, was Maximova's performance in Martha Clarke's Gardens of Villandry. In addition to her rare gifts of musicality and lyricism, Maximova is striking in her ability to convey in a dance a whole gamut of different moods. She gave everything equal significance--the complex lifts, the delicately outlined turn of the head, the gentle sigh, and the hardly perceptible flicker of eyelashes. At the end of the evening, the curtain calls continued for more than half an hour.