An exuberant Don Quixote proves that the Bolshoi is back, bigger and better than before, says David Dougill

Bolshoi means big in Russian, and there was the real buzz of a big night around the Royal Opera House on Monday, for the start of the Bolshoi Ballet’s first full-scale London season since 1999. During the five-year gap, we have grown used to the rival Kirov Ballet, from St Petersburg, commanding the London summer ballet fest, while the Muscovites struggled with financial, political and artistic tribulations at home, and licked their wounds from an ill-advised, scaled-down and patchy visit to Drury Lane in 2001.

Now revitalised under a new director, Alexei Ratmansky, the Bolshoi has reclaimed Covent Garden, where the company was first seen as a revelation 41 years ago, presented again by its origi-nal impresarios, the Hochhausers. This season includes a couple of novelties — a radical new Romeo and Juliet, and a reconstruction of Petipa’s early Egyptian fantasy The Pharaoh’s Daughter — but it opened with classic Bolshoi fare, the exuberant feast of Don Quixote, created for the company by Petipa in 1869, and kept alive ever since in a succession of revised stagings.

The current production (1999), by Alexei Fadeyechev, returns largely to the text established a century ago by Alexander Gorsky, and carries a delightful feel of that period, with Sergei Barkhin’s pretty painted d_cors — a sun-drenched Barcelona with a sea vista, a gorgeous forest and a mountain setting for the vision scene — and parades of vividly detailed costumes based on old originals. For a few minutes, early in Monday’s performance, it seemed we might not see them, as the lights and scene change failed. Then all was well again, and the stage was bright and full to bubbling with festive tambourine- and fan-toting townsfolk and cloak-twirling tor-eadors. The Bolshoi ensembles whip through their Spanish dances with heart-warming enthusiasm and flair — never a dull moment, from one cracking number to another. The company has brought its own orchestra to London, and lively playing of Ludwig Minkus’s rollickingly tuneful music, under Pavel Sorokin’s baton, underpinned the exhilaration.

The ballet’s plot (taken from an episode in Cervantes’s novel) is a comic romance in which the young lovers, Kitri, the innkeeper’s daughter, and Basil, the impecu- nious barber, outwit her father’s attempt to marry her to a rich fop, Gamache. The Bolshoi play the character roles with relish. Victor Alekhin, with his wobbly legs and looking glass, is a witty Gamache; Alexander Petukhov is engagingly funny as Sanchopanza; Alexei Loparevich a tottery dreamer as the Don. They are linking figures, but Kitri and Basil are the stars.

Monday’s Kitri was the newly promoted principal Maria Alexandrova, who sailed and sped through the part with technical ease and aplomb, paired with Sergei Filin as Basil, elegant and dazzling. They made light of all the choreography’s bravura demands. So, too, on the next night, did Svetlana Zakharova and Andrei Uvarov, in a partnership that felt a better match. Zakharova, who joined the Bolshoi from the Kirov last year with a distinguished international career in full flow, has the extra quality of unforced charm.

Other notable star spots were shared by the stylishly seductive Irina Zibrova as Mercedes; the lovely Maria Allash and Alexandrova, in two casts, as the Street Dancer; Ekaterina Shipulina and Allash alternating in the soaring leaps of the Queen of the Dryads; and Nina Kaptsova as the prettiest and perkiest of Cupids. Special mention, also, to Yulianna Malkha- syants, whose Gypsy Dance was as exotic as her name — her fiery abandon (to a Minkus number that could have been written for a Hollywood epic) brought the house down. So, yes, the Bolshoi did give us a feast.