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The Kirov production, on the other hand, has its source in an Oakland Ballet production in 1981 by Bronislava Nijinska's daughter Irina, which supplemented an earlier version of the Royal Ballet's score with notes left behind by the choreographer, and with Irina's memories of her mother's ballet. Howard Sayette, who was balletmaster at Oakland, staged this version for the Kirov.

While the Royal Ballet's text has a powerful claim to authenticity, the Oakland production is not necessarily to be dismissed as a secondary source. Choreographers do make changes to their creations and Irina Nijinska is a privileged witness. Nonetheless there were problems with the Kirov production, many of them rooted in a complete lack of rehearsal time. For that reason alone, the Kirov's interpretation cannot yet be seen as a reliable account of Irina Nijinska's version of her mother's work.

One difference between the two versions comes shortly after the opening curtain. As the bride and her assistants bourrée on parallel pointe, the braids are held high. In the Oakland production, this is done by the dancers on the extreme right and left, while in the Royal Ballet version the braids are borne by the dancers on the far right and the bride's nearside left, then changing to the far left and nearside right. It may seem a small detail: however, according to members of the Royal Ballet 1966 cast, Bronislava Nijinska was extremely adamant about the asymmetries of this ballet and when the dancers attempted to reimport symmetries, she would remind them sternly "This is not Swan Lake ." Irina Nijinska, on the other hand, had a different conception of Les Noce's aesthetic. Interviewed in 1992, she told Andrea Grodsky Huber of 'Ballet Review' that she regarded Les Noces as symmetrical. This means that the Oakland/Kirov version is, from the outset, rooted in a fundamentally different conception of the ballet's aesthetic.  

The Kirov's dancers 'smoothed' Nijinska's original, so that it seemed almost classical again. Nijinska insisted on very characteristic positions of the arms; they were held in check - bent elbows with clenched fists. The Kirov dancers softened this position throughout, with carriage of the arms often reminiscent of classical port-de-bras.

The pulse set by the conductor Mikhail Agrest may have been close to Stravinsky's metronome markings and apt to concert performance. It was unsatisfactory here. Some dancers were visibly struggling with the choreography, their lips seen to move as they struggled with the complexity of the counts.

While the architecture of the original was present, what was missing was the detailing that gives the work its distinctive character. This rests not in its distinctive friezes and jumps merely, but also in the closely etched steps that connect the whole. Too often when dancers broke formation from a frieze, the steps became vague and fuzzy. Those steps too often lacked the earthing on which Nijinska insisted, as if the dancers lifted the very ground with them when they jumped. The critic Edwin Denby, writing in 1936, described the downward thrust of the bodies as giving "a sense beyond decoration." It was this that I missed and while I quite liked the quality of the men's 'eagle' jumps with which the Kirov's Consecration of the Groom ends, there was real room for doubt as to whether this was what Nijinska would have wanted: they were so out of character with everything one knows about this work.

In the Consecration of the Groom , the 'pumping' steps of groom and assistants lacked the force we so associate with them. When the Groom's pyramid in its turn broke formation, the four dancers seemed visibly uncomfortable with the 'caterpillar' like folk-step which follows, one losing his way in the choreography.

What struck me throughout was a gestural deficit; whether this is because the Oakland version is short on gesture, or whether - as seems more likely - the dancers did not know the piece, it was very hard to say. They seemed discomfited by the work - although I was taken with the quality of the soloists (the leaders of the bride's and groom's friends) in the wedding scene.

In the cell scene, Bronislava Nijinska's favourite part of Les Noces (and the section that she herself notated most carefully), a great deal of detailing on the raised stage seemed to be missing: the bride at one point moving across stage, when the groom should have moved with her. The effect of the final frieze - the very culmination of the ballet - in which bride's and groom's friends unite, was completely lost. In the Royal Ballet production, the men arc their arms collectively to give the effect of a menorah. It is one of the great balletic images, but it was absent here. Instead the dancers confusedly found their places and half-heartedly raised their arms.

In sum, it seemed as if the structure of the piece had been ironed out and simplified and lacked the weighting that made it so distinctive. Most importantly however, the work had lost its ritual feel. The ballet is a deeply solemn one, an act of consecration and a sacred drama - one which is both religious and which marks the triumph of the collective will over that of the individual. For a performance to work, dancers must be welded into a cohesive whole and live and breathe as a unity. This was utterly absent from the Kirov's performance.

It would be unfair to lay blame for this at Howard Sayette's door. He has had to mount the work in near-impossible conditions and it would be quite wrong to come to a considered view of the Oakland Les Noces based merely on the Kirov's account of it. For the Kirov to bring an alternative Les Noces to the very theatre in which Bronislava Nijinska so wonderfully restored it was a highly symbolic act, and one of breathtaking confidence. Unfortunately the Kirov did not do the work justice.