For his simple fairy tale, Bourmeister went back to Tchaikovsky's 1877 score, written for Petipa's first, unsuccessful version for the Bolshoi Ballet. (The most familiar Swan Lake descends from Petipa and Ivanov's second attempt, for the Kirov Ballet in 1894). Bourmeister stripped the ballet of its spiritual dimension – the prince's search for and subsequent betrayal of an ideal – to create a parable about love that overcomes adversity because a good man refuses to give in to the dictates of a corrupt system.

So what about the famous betrayal in which Siegfried forgoes his true love, Odette, in favor of the sexually alluring Odile, creature of the evil magician Rothbart? Bourmeister has an answer: the poor boy didn't know what he was doing. Rothbart not only brings Odile to the festivities during which Siegfried has to choose a bride, but he also brings a retinue of cape-swirling attendants and divertissement artists who have an intoxicating effect on the whole court, prince included.

At the end the lovers are united when Odette, delivered from Rothbart's curse, is turned back into a princess. The last image of the two of them embracing on top of a rock is indebted to Hollywood as much as it is to Soviet calendar art.

Tatyana Chrenobrovkina, long-limbed with exquisite lines and pristine point work, dances the demanding Odette-Odile roles as two almost different characters. Conventional interpretations demand enough of an overlap to make Siegfried's infatuation with the black swan plausible. Not here: this black swan is totally Rothbart's creature; in her duet with the prince (Dmitry Zababurin), the magician is an ever present third partner, though Odette's tremulous fragility may be echoed in Odile's feverish, as if bedeviled, intensity.

The additional music (Bourmeister used all of what Tchaikovsky originally wrote) in the first act gives the choreographer the opportunity to flesh out Siegfried (the 1877 version of the prince, Pavel Gerdt, was 50 years old and couldn't really dance much anymore). Bourmeister's Siegfried is convivial, much at ease with his friends and local girls, one of whom he especially seems to favor. But he is also restless, interacting only briefly with everyone. Some of this prince's sympathy for simple folk, and his disdain for his mother's court, is part of ballet's romantic heritage – but it also dovetails nicely with Soviet-style populism. On opening night (June 4) the role was danced by a handsome but emotionally stiff Geory Smilevsky (there are three different casts).

This Swan Lake's male bravura dancing belongs to the jester, Vyacheslav Buchkovksy, whose general antics and spitfire turns are impressive, despite one-dimensional repetitions. One favorite change concerns the four cygnets, a standard Swan Lake episode much mocked by ballet detractors, in which four hand-holding swans dance in unison right after Siegfried and Odette's tender love duet. The cygnets always looked like an inappropriate and unnecessary comic relief. Bourmeister brings the cygnets back at the end of the ballet as a kind of retinue to the Swan Queen, so their earlier presence makes at least some sense.