Svetlana Zakharova has had her ups and downs on the London stage, but in Swan Lake she has always produced grand-scale ballerina performances. She hasn't Yuliana Lopatkina's lunar glamour nor Nadezhda Gracheva's chilly beauty, but she has such extraordinary physical gifts that she seems, at times, quite other-dimensional. And so it was last Thursday, when the Bolshoi performed Yuri Grigorovitch's revised version of the ballet. Zakharova was an unearthly Odette, every fibre of her being yearning skywards, and a sumptuous vampire of an Odile. Her Siegfried was Andrei Uvarov, a dancer of old-school courtliness and elegance.

Grigorovitch's Swan Lake has had a troubled history. The original 1969 Moscow production was censored by the ministry of culture; it demanded a more traditional text and a politically correct happy ending. Grigorovitch resisted for as long as he dared, but finally capitulated. The affair, and Grigorovitch's subsequent bitterness, are now ballet legend. Offered the chance to rework the piece in 2001, however, he altered only the ending, offering a Giselle-style denouement in which the remorseful prince finds himself loveless and alone. This unifies the piece, and ties in with Grigorovitch's reading of the prince as a man torn between good intentions and a mordent, inward-looking nature (a man, perhaps, very like Grigorovitch himself). It also makes sense of the idea of the sorcerer being the embodiment of Siegfried's dark side.

Dramatically, however, the new ending leaves us hanging, and fails to solve the old version's structural shortcomings. Grigorovitch is so keen to get to grips with his themes of inversion and the doppelganger, and so assiduous in his deleting of the mime scenes (which he considered old hat) that he entirely neglects to establish Siegfried's situation. Neither his coming-of-age nor the dynastic imperative of his choosing a bride are directly referred to. This gives the ensuing action an almost abstract character, which in its turn mutes Ivanov's original choreography (almost nothing of Petipa survives here).

That said, there is a huge amount to be enjoyed. Simon Virsaladze's designs are a masterpiece of 1960s gothic. In the lakeside scenes, for example, teutonic emblems and banqueting-hall candelabra hover surrealistically overhead. The corps de ballet dance with precision and brilliance, rank after fabulous rank of them, and the ensemble pieces are an unalloyed joy.

This is the Bolshoi we feared we'd never