Music: The Bolshoi's Bounce

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The world's indoor high-jump record is officially held by a Boston University freshman named John Thomas, who last month propelled himself 7 ft. 1¾ in. into space. Unofficially, it is held by the members of the Bolshoi Ballet, who last week bounded about the stage of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House like a herd of nail-tailed wallabies. In the second week of their eight-week U.S. visit, the Russian dancers proved that they can leap higher, farther and more daringly than anything north of Australia. More important, in some dazzling performances of Swan Lake, they gave Manhattan audiences their first look at the Soviet classical ballet linked to the lavish, lush dance style that is the source of the company's fame.

The Bolshoi's Swan Lake was strikingly different from the two versions—by the New York City Ballet and Britain's Royal Ballet—most frequently seen in the West. While the City Ballet version telescopes the action into a single act and provides brilliant virtuoso movements for the entire ballet corps, the Bolshoi keeps the original four acts and focuses on the soloists, with the corps often planted in mere statuesque rows and curves. The traditional Swan Lake ending, which is authentically portrayed by the Royal Ballet—the Princess changed back into a swan, forever lost to the world—is drastically altered in the Bolshoi version.

As the Russians do it, the evil bird-sorcerer is killed by the Prince, and the lovers walk happily into a rose-colored sky; the fight in which the Prince tears off one of his enemy's wings is a bit of Socialist realism totally out of place in the classical ballet, but it makes for some immensely exciting dance. The effect of these and other changes was to make the Russian Swan Lake a looser, more romantic interpretation than Western observers are accustomed to seeing. On the other hand, the Bolshoi Swan Lake provided the soloists with more elbowroom to stitch figures of gaudy and often moving brilliance.

Lyricism over Steel. Two successive performances of Swan Lake introduced Ballerinas Maya Plisetskaya and Nina Timofeyeva, two of the Bolshoi's first-line quartet of female dancers (of the first week's stars, Galina Ulanova no longer dances Swan Lake, and Raissa Struchkova is not doing so at the Met). Both ballerinas were superb in the double role of Odette-Odile—the Swan Princess and her evil counterpart. Plisetskaya danced her roles with a more contained fire, whipped her sprung-steel body through scissored leaps and glittering turns, gave the role of Odile a brittle profile that suggested the character's corrosive venom even through her most lyric nights.

Timofeyeva relied on a broader, more flowing style, achieved some of her most moving effects in the series of soaring Act II lifts and in the last-act duet in which she hovered back to consciousness on feet as tremulous as a butterfly's wing. And where Plisetskaya had omitted the famous 32 fouettés (snapped turns) in the "Black Swan Pas de Deux," Timofeyeva whipped them off with a bravura that brought the house alive with a roar.