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There is no dancer at the Bolshoi who is dancing on such large a scale as Natalia Osipova, that human missile parading herself as a ballerina. When she flings herself at Basilio, she does so with such an elemental energy you fear that should he miss her she will land at the very back of the stalls. Her leg is kicked back with such care-free abandon, she throws herself into jumps and turns and at their end she pushes them forward so that they become a sun-burst of dazzling light. Her speed and elevation are miraculous and at every twist and turn of this merry romp she proclaims ‘I am Kitri’ and we mess with her at our peril.

Last year her performance was a wonder, a glorious finale to a brilliant season, and this year it is wondrous even more, for since then she has become a completer ballerina. Cantilena, that Russian sense of pouring legato phrasing, was what was lacking then, but this year it is there in spades. See her as the vision of Dulcinea and watch the way she softens the phrases, each movement connected by a thread of dulcet texture. For this, we must in no small way thank her coach Marina Kondratieva, who is instilling in her charge some of the lyricism for which she herself was famed, and on the basis of the Dryad sequence, Osipova’s Giselle is now becoming an exciting prospect.
 

Ivan Vasiliev was her Basilio, and thus far the season has failed to explain the excitement surrounding him. That was until this moment. Here, Vasiliev performs such bravura technical feats at such a height and at such a speed that you think you can never have seen them before. Time appears to still whilst he is mid-flight, allowing him to do the extra turns, to split his legs, to add an extra beat. He performs with a dance fire, a diabolism that marks him out as a star of the future and if he sometimes appears too sure of himself, a little too cocky, time and maturity will iron that out.

Together they feed off one another’s high dramatics, commanding one another to better, to bolder. They dance one more performance on Saturday afternoon and you miss it at your peril. She flirts, he plays, they rage, they kiss – has the love of Kitri and Basilio ever had such a rocky course?