Between them Evgenia Obraztsova as Princess Aurora and Ekaterina Kondaurova as the Lilac Fairy stole the show, though with a compact display of virile technique Igor Kolb as Prince Désiré was a powerful adjunct, and the outstanding soloists and corps performed to admiration as always, not least in the divertissements of the final act.
      The control, accuracy and sweetness of Obraztsova is breathtaking. In this ballet more than any of his others Petipa wishes his principal ballerinas to remain stationary on single pointe, not just in the rose garden but at every opportunity in which a delicate, balanced stillness in the midst of flight seems to him appropriate. Obraztsova achieved this repeatedly. In the petite, gravity-free neatness of her movement there seems to be real joy: she smiles and smiles with unaffected delight, the purest simulacrum of that little toy ballerina who used to pop up in a music box I had as a boy, and pirouette perfectly round and around until the music died away.
      Ekaterina Kondaurova’s majestic poise, the beauty of the line of her back, the ease of her battements, the carriage of her arms, the elegance of her every gesture, is a distillation of balleticism. She too seems to have a special relationship with gravity, much to her advantage; as the Lilac Fairy, charged with restoring good to a dispensation upset by malice and threat, she radiates serenity and the certainty that all will be well. This is a triumph of Petipa’s choreography, of course, but it has to be danced with conviction to work its magic, and Kondaurova does so, consummately.
      It is an education to watch these two. Were all four of Vaganova’s arabesque positions demonstrated by these wonderful artists during this performance, the extended leg at a flawless right-angle to the body, the positioning of the arms forward as exact as could be? It would seem that everyone in the Mariinsky corps can effect grands battements of almost vertical elevation, but Kondaurova’s effortlessly graceful examples are an entire ballet school in themselves.
      The excellence of this company consists not only or merely in what its members are technically capable of – which, to put the matter briefly, is: morphological miracles – but the fact that what they have is technique that is, in the highest instinctive sense, artistry itself, a distillation and embodiment of the very essence of balleticism. Audiences feel, as they stagger entranced from a Mariinsky performance, like Bizet when he first heard Beethoven’s Third Symphony: he was so transported that he could not find his head to put his hat on.
      The Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg has a larger stage than the Royal Opera House, and the opulent set seemed just a little cramped in Covent Garden, with the stage itself looking crowded in the opening scene when all the fairies and the court were assembled and Carabosse, menacingly portrayed by Islom Baimuradov, arrived with his train. But it is a gorgeous staging, from set to costumes; the opening moments have a positively Disney feel about them, but the sensation of witnessing a brightly coloured and brilliantly lit animated film is quickly dissipated by the dancing, and the court scene of the final act is splendid, complete with spouting water fountain and fine reprises of the Bluebird and Puss-in-Boots pas de deux.
      The Mariinsky dances the full score of the ballet. Petipa was far more interested in dance than story, and had much less narrative skill than – for example - either Macmillan or Ashton. Sergeyev’s reworkings do nothing to diminish the periodic reliance on mime, or the superfluity of acting characters. These considerations are what make the Mariinsky’s “Sleeping Beauty”, like its “Romeo and Juliet”, appear long and somewhat arbitrary as theatre to anyone for whom the theatrical aspect matters. But in fact it does not matter much when the dancing is of such quality; and the dance is of course, and by far, the chief point. For me the performances could happily be a hundred acts longer, because I could watch Evgenia Obraztsova and Ekaterina Kondaurova and all their Mariinsky colleagues forever.
AC Grayling