It happens every time: The music from Coppélia, from La Source, from Sylvia comes on, and you’re caught up in Delibes’ ravishing—and supremely danceable—tunes and orchestration. Ashton loved him. Balanchine loved him. And Tchaikovsky famously wrote to a friend that Sylvia was “the first ballet in which the music constitutes not only the chief but the sole point of interest. What charm, what elegance, what a wealth of melody, rhythm and harmony! It put me to shame. Had I known that music, I would not have written Swan Lake.”

Sylvia was created in 1876, six years after Coppélia, and it had the honor of being the first ballet to be staged at Garnier’s magnificent new Paris opera house. It held the stage for almost 20 years, but after that was seen only occasionally, mostly in Russia, until Ashton re-created it for Margot Fonteyn in 1952, in the version A.B.T. has recently been presenting at the Met.

Why hasn’t Sylvia become a staple of the repertory? The reason can only be the weak story, which unlike the stories of the few 19th-century ballets that have survived, seems to have no resonance: It’s pure plot, and conventional plot at that. Do we really care whether the dopey shepherd Aminta ends up with the bossy Sylvia, that votary of the goddess Diana? Or how Sylvia escapes from the cave of Orion, the wicked hunter who abducts her? How can so pointless a story carry us through three acts of dance, however sublime the music? Frederick Ashton found the key in his own profound belief in the power of love—or of Eros, as he’s called in the ballet. And, of course, in his exquisite choreographic skill (though even the Ashton version isn’t a complete success).

Now Mark Morris has made an entirely new Sylvia, and we’ve been waiting a long time for the San Francisco Ballet, for whom he created it, to bring it to New York. I can’t remember anticipating a new ballet so eagerly. Alas, it came, I saw, but I wasn’t conquered. I don’t know what I expected—perhaps some kind of reinvention of the story and a new, highly personal choreographic approach. What we got was a Sylvia more cute than feeling—conventional in its relation to classical ballet yet thin in classical vocabulary. Morris has made other ballets, but the ones I’ve seen tend to look like modern dance on pointe. Sylvia looks as if he’s trying to master ballet itself, and it doesn’t work. From the very start, the going is weak: Dryads, Satyrs and Naiads—four each—gambol and cavort around, and then gambol and cavort some more; it’s repetitious and ungainly. When Sylvia enters with her band of virgins, she has nothing to dance—during the beautiful valse lente, she’s drifting back and forth on a swing. Only the third-act pas de deux provides a well-made stretch of classicism, and it falls like rain on parched earth. Opening night, you could sense the audience’s gratitude.

Morris’ best act is the second, partly because it’s up for grabs—there aren’t any famous set pieces, and nothing much happens except that Sylvia, trapped in the cave, gets Orion and his eight goons drunk by stamping on some grapes to make wine. The goons are threatening, then comic, and there’s a charming sequence when first Sylvia, then the thugs, dart across a big rock pile and jeté off into waiting arms—it’s the one genuinely witty (as opposed to jokey) moment in the ballet. At the third performance, when at last we had an appropriate Sylvia (Vanessa Zahorian) and an Orion more love-besotted than dangerous, her rescue by Eros hardly seemed necessary: think Snow White and the Eight Dwarfs. Clever, resolute Sylvia had things well under control. (Zahorian, by the way, showed from her first step in the big pas de deux what a lovely, musical dancer she is. No wonder she looked out of things in the first act, when she had nothing real to dance.)

If Sylvia is about anything, it’s the conflict between Eros and Diana (Eros wins). Ashton takes this seriously; Morris takes it comically. His Eros capers around in disguise—he’s a comic sorcerer who brings Aminta back to life when he’s shot by one of Sylvia’s arrows; he’s a pirate in rajah drag who brings Sylvia to the last-act bacchanal among a boatload of harem-type slaves (she’s in bilious pink; they’re in vermillion and tangerine). Morris gives his Eros some amusing material, but makes things hard for him with the clumsy disrobing sequences, when the god has to shed his disguises and make himself known. The staging for Eros goes wrong at the start, when we see him surreptitiously clambering up next to his statue. Or is this awkwardness meant to be part of the joke?

But the real letdown is that Morris, the most musical of choreographers, has failed to respond deeply to the score. His ballet is all surface, some of it pleasing, but Delibes’ music is far deeper. (Not that you’d have known it from the tame reading of the score, conducted by San Francisco’s music director, Martin West. Listen to the recording by Richard Bonynge and you’ll see why it’s not farfetched to think of Wagner at certain moments.) As a result, Mark Morris’ Sylvia is neither a triumph nor a disaster; it’s a disappointment.

AS FOR THE SAN FRANCISCO COMPANY ITSELF, it took a while before you could see why it’s universally considered one of the finest in the country. Opening night was one of those ghastly bits-and-pieces gala programs in which everything rushes past in a blur and nothing looks good. It began with William Forsythe’s The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude (just as irritating as when the Kirov did it in Washington a few weeks ago) and ended with a noticeably ragged performance of the third movement from Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces. In between were 13 snippets, ranging from a dreary Don Quixote pas de deux to an excerpt from Yuri Possokhov’s Reflections, featuring two superb dancers (Muriel Maffre and Damian Smith), some tall mirrors and steps of staggering ugliness. Helgi Tomasson, the artistic director, was represented by three uninspired works, as well as a dismal reworking of the Swan Lake pas de trios.

The quality of the company began to announce itself with Sylvia—not so much through the principals (Yuan Yuan Tan, for instance, was cast against type in the central role) but through the corps, with their beautiful feet and flexible, elegant carriage. Not until the mixed bill on the last night, though, did the company fully reveal its many and various strengths.

There were three ballets (every one of them too long). First, yet another Tomasson piece (7 for Eight) to Bach and, typical of his choreography going back to his City Ballet days, careful, derivative and not very interesting; an extended—overextended—new (2005) piece by Christopher Wheeldon called Quaternary (featuring not one but two lugubrious adagio duets for Tan and Smith), which would have been twice as interesting at half the length; and Forsythe’s Artifact Suite, another endless but sporadically effective exercise in mass, juiced-up neoclassicism, punctuated by sterile echoes of Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements and Stravinsky Violin Concerto.

These three works were far too similar in tone to constitute a good program. You could call the genre “Earnest Modern.”

But the dancers! On the whole, the men are even more remarkable than the women. There was a section of the Forsythe featuring two groups of five men each, every one of them centered, virile, energized and attractive. They’re not the individual superstar virtuosos of A.B.T.; they may, in fact, be too uniform. But I don’t want to sound negative: No other American company has such depth in its male contingent. And several of them do stand out—Smith, Pascal Molat, Gonzalo Garcia, Joan Boada. The women are a little less extraordinary, but they, too, are beautifully trained and they’re more differentiated than the men. Yuan Yuan Tan, with her lovely line and ballerina glamour, is a very different kind of dancer from the grand, powerful Maffre, the quick, appealing Tina LeBlanc, the intense Lorena Feijoo (who was as effective in the Forsythe piece as she was charmless in the Don Q. pas de deux).

I have strong reservations about its repertory, but San Francisco Ballet strikes me as deeply virtuous, and I can’t wait to see it again. Even so, it lacks, for me, a crucial element of great dancing: large-scale personal expressivity. Like most companies, it reflects the characteristics of its leader. Tomasson was an immaculate classicist—elegant, tasteful, contained, never vulgar, always correct and frequently charming; that’s what his company is like, too (several of the men actually look like him). But he never fully absorbed Balanchine’s insistence on dancing full-out: His movement was always measured, his presence small-scale. Peter Martins was a cool, smooth dancer, Edward Villella was explosive and full of feeling, and their companies reflect their qualities. How could it be otherwise? Splendid as Tomasson’s San Francisco is, I can’t help wanting more—dancers not only superbly trained, hard-working and personable, but dancers who thrill.

It happens every time: The music from Coppélia, from La Source, from Sylvia comes on, and you’re caught up in Delibes’ ravishing—and supremely danceable—tunes and orchestration. Ashton loved him. Balanchine loved him. And Tchaikovsky famously wrote to a friend that Sylvia was “the first ballet in which the music constitutes not only the chief but the sole point of interest. What charm, what elegance, what a wealth of melody, rhythm and harmony! It put me to shame. Had I known that music, I would not have written Swan Lake.”

Sylvia was created in 1876, six years after Coppélia, and it had the honor of being the first ballet to be staged at Garnier’s magnificent new Paris opera house. It held the stage for almost 20 years, but after that was seen only occasionally, mostly in Russia, until Ashton re-created it for Margot Fonteyn in 1952, in the version A.B.T. has recently been presenting at the Met.

Why hasn’t Sylvia become a staple of the repertory? The reason can only be the weak story, which unlike the stories of the few 19th-century ballets that have survived, seems to have no resonance: It’s pure plot, and conventional plot at that. Do we really care whether the dopey shepherd Aminta ends up with the bossy Sylvia, that votary of the goddess Diana? Or how Sylvia escapes from the cave of Orion, the wicked hunter who abducts her? How can so pointless a story carry us through three acts of dance, however sublime the music? Frederick Ashton found the key in his own profound belief in the power of love—or of Eros, as he’s called in the ballet. And, of course, in his exquisite choreographic skill (though even the Ashton version isn’t a complete success).

Now Mark Morris has made an entirely new Sylvia, and we’ve been waiting a long time for the San Francisco Ballet, for whom he created it, to bring it to New York. I can’t remember anticipating a new ballet so eagerly. Alas, it came, I saw, but I wasn’t conquered. I don’t know what I expected—perhaps some kind of reinvention of the story and a new, highly personal choreographic approach. What we got was a Sylvia more cute than feeling—conventional in its relation to classical ballet yet thin in classical vocabulary. Morris has made other ballets, but the ones I’ve seen tend to look like modern dance on pointe. Sylvia looks as if he’s trying to master ballet itself, and it doesn’t work. From the very start, the going is weak: Dryads, Satyrs and Naiads—four each—gambol and cavort around, and then gambol and cavort some more; it’s repetitious and ungainly. When Sylvia enters with her band of virgins, she has nothing to dance—during the beautiful valse lente, she’s drifting back and forth on a swing. Only the third-act pas de deux provides a well-made stretch of classicism, and it falls like rain on parched earth. Opening night, you could sense the audience’s gratitude.

Morris’ best act is the second, partly because it’s up for grabs—there aren’t any famous set pieces, and nothing much happens except that Sylvia, trapped in the cave, gets Orion and his eight goons drunk by stamping on some grapes to make wine. The goons are threatening, then comic, and there’s a charming sequence when first Sylvia, then the thugs, dart across a big rock pile and jeté off into waiting arms—it’s the one genuinely witty (as opposed to jokey) moment in the ballet. At the third performance, when at last we had an appropriate Sylvia (Vanessa Zahorian) and an Orion more love-besotted than dangerous, her rescue by Eros hardly seemed necessary: think Snow White and the Eight Dwarfs. Clever, resolute Sylvia had things well under control. (Zahorian, by the way, showed from her first step in the big pas de deux what a lovely, musical dancer she is. No wonder she looked out of things in the first act, when she had nothing real to dance.)

If Sylvia is about anything, it’s the conflict between Eros and Diana (Eros wins). Ashton takes this seriously; Morris takes it comically. His Eros capers around in disguise—he’s a comic sorcerer who brings Aminta back to life when he’s shot by one of Sylvia’s arrows; he’s a pirate in rajah drag who brings Sylvia to the last-act bacchanal among a boatload of harem-type slaves (she’s in bilious pink; they’re in vermillion and tangerine). Morris gives his Eros some amusing material, but makes things hard for him with the clumsy disrobing sequences, when the god has to shed his disguises and make himself known. The staging for Eros goes wrong at the start, when we see him surreptitiously clambering up next to his statue. Or is this awkwardness meant to be part of the joke?

But the real letdown is that Morris, the most musical of choreographers, has failed to respond deeply to the score. His ballet is all surface, some of it pleasing, but Delibes’ music is far deeper. (Not that you’d have known it from the tame reading of the score, conducted by San Francisco’s music director, Martin West. Listen to the recording by Richard Bonynge and you’ll see why it’s not farfetched to think of Wagner at certain moments.) As a result, Mark Morris’ Sylvia is neither a triumph nor a disaster; it’s a disappointment.

AS FOR THE SAN FRANCISCO COMPANY ITSELF, it took a while before you could see why it’s universally considered one of the finest in the country. Opening night was one of those ghastly bits-and-pieces gala programs in which everything rushes past in a blur and nothing looks good. It began with William Forsythe’s The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude (just as irritating as when the Kirov did it in Washington a few weeks ago) and ended with a noticeably ragged performance of the third movement from Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces. In between were 13 snippets, ranging from a dreary Don Quixote pas de deux to an excerpt from Yuri Possokhov’s Reflections, featuring two superb dancers (Muriel Maffre and Damian Smith), some tall mirrors and steps of staggering ugliness. Helgi Tomasson, the artistic director, was represented by three uninspired works, as well as a dismal reworking of the Swan Lake pas de trios.

The quality of the company began to announce itself with Sylvia—not so much through the principals (Yuan Yuan Tan, for instance, was cast against type in the central role) but through the corps, with their beautiful feet and flexible, elegant carriage. Not until the mixed bill on the last night, though, did the company fully reveal its many and various strengths.

There were three ballets (every one of them too long). First, yet another Tomasson piece ( 7 for Eight) to Bach and, typical of his choreography going back to his City Ballet days, careful, derivative and not very interesting; an extended—overextended—new (2005) piece by Christopher Wheeldon called Quaternary (featuring not one but two lugubrious adagio duets for Tan and Smith), which would have been twice as interesting at half the length; and Forsythe’s Artifact Suite, another endless but sporadically effective exercise in mass, juiced-up neoclassicism, punctuated by sterile echoes of Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements and Stravinsky Violin Concerto.

These three works were far too similar in tone to constitute a good program. You could call the genre “Earnest Modern.”

But the dancers! On the whole, the men are even more remarkable than the women. There was a section of the Forsythe featuring two groups of five men each, every one of them centered, virile, energized and attractive. They’re not the individual superstar virtuosos of A.B.T.; they may, in fact, be too uniform. But I don’t want to sound negative: No other American company has such depth in its male contingent. And several of them do stand out—Smith, Pascal Molat, Gonzalo Garcia, Joan Boada. The women are a little less extraordinary, but they, too, are beautifully trained and they’re more differentiated than the men. Yuan Yuan Tan, with her lovely line and ballerina glamour, is a very different kind of dancer from the grand, powerful Maffre, the quick, appealing Tina LeBlanc, the intense Lorena Feijoo (who was as effective in the Forsythe piece as she was charmless in the Don Q. pas de deux).

I have strong reservations about its repertory, but San Francisco Ballet strikes me as deeply virtuous, and I can’t wait to see it again. Even so, it lacks, for me, a crucial element of great dancing: large-scale personal expressivity. Like most companies, it reflects the characteristics of its leader. Tomasson was an immaculate classicist—elegant, tasteful, contained, never vulgar, always correct and frequently charming; that’s what his company is like, too (several of the men actually look like him). But he never fully absorbed Balanchine’s insistence on dancing full-out: His movement was always measured, his presence small-scale. Peter Martins was a cool, smooth dancer, Edward Villella was explosive and full of feeling, and their companies reflect their qualities. How could it be otherwise? Splendid as Tomasson’s San Francisco is, I can’t help wanting more—dancers not only superbly trained, hard-working and personable, but dancers who thrill.

Beauty isn’t like any other ballet. It isn’t, of course, a tragedy or a melodrama, but it’s also not a boy-meets-girl comedy—a Coppélia, a Fille Mal Gardée; those works present their heroines with simple domestic problems, which get predictably resolved. And it’s not a wish-fulfillment fantasy like Cinderella. The Sleeping Beauty, rather, looks at the cycle of life, involves a brush with malignity and death, and gives us a heroine who must awaken to love and sexual experience, and whose trajectory to emotional fulfillment implies the restoration of the entire world to harmony.

This is no small order, and many—most—productions falter on their way to achieving it. How many great Beautys can we recall? Hardly a man is still alive (can there be any?) who remembers Diaghilev’s extravagant London production of 1921—the production that more or less bankrupted him. Balanchine never attempted a complete Sleeping Beauty, much as he loved it (and referred to it constantly in his work); no Ballet Theater Beauty has ever done the trick; Peter Martins’ compact version misses the glory. There were lovely Kirov performances in the 60’s (with Kolpakova), but the Kirov is now giving us its painstaking and glacial reconstruction of the 1890 original. And the two most recent Royal Ballet attempts have been failures.

It was the Sadler’s Wells/Royal staging—conceived in 1946 for the postwar reopening of Covent Garden—that became the benchmark for Beautys in the West. In a new book celebrating the Royal’s 75th anniversary, the British dance critic Zoë Anderson describes it: “The production, designed by Oliver Messel, was a vision of splendour at a time of bitter austerity. Paint and canvas were scarce, rationing was still in force, coupons had to be found for fabrics, gloves and boots. The Queen’s train was made from somebody’s velvet curtains …. Messel’s sets combined airy architectural fantasy with a sense of place. The soft colours set the dancers off, surrounding them with light and space … groupings looked marvelous …. ” And, of course, it starred Fonteyn in her greatest role.

It was this same production that three years later, in 1949, opened the famous Sadler’s Wells season in New York, earned the company its international reputation, crowned Fonteyn as a prima ballerina assoluta, and—to be a touch fanciful—kissed classical ballet back to life in America. It’s not only memory, often so treacherous, that keeps it so dear to us; what we have on film confirms its beauty, its style, its musicality and Fonteyn’s greatness. For years the company toured it in America, until finally it was gone. And nothing on its level has come along to replace it. The Royal’s style eroded; the company’s focus was more and more on the far-from-classical dance dramas of Kenneth MacMillan; even Frederick Ashton, the company’s great choreographer, was neglected—a pattern that has been reversed in recent years, first under Anthony Dowell, now under Monica Mason.

As for Beauty, there was a new production in 1968; another (by MacMillan) in 1973; another in 1977; another (by Dowell) in 1994; another (by Makarova) in 2003. Now, only three years later, Mason has brought to America the company’s latest attempt to restore its signature work to its former glory.

Here’s how the credits run: “Choreography by Marius Petipa. Additional Choreography by Frederick Ashton, Anthony Dowell, Christopher Wheeldon. Production by Monica Mason, Christopher Newton after Ninette de Valois and Nicholas Sergeyev. Original Designs by Oliver Messel. Realization and Additional Designs by Peter Farmer …. ” What does all that mean? That Mason has decided to go backwards in order to progress. The key decision was to “realize” the Messel sets and costumes—to restore to Beauty the lovely atmosphere it once exemplified.

I saw this new Beauty at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and it was immediately apparent that it was too big for the stage—or the stage was too small for it. Everything looked cramped. There should have been more room in the Prologue for the wicked fairy Carabosse and her scampering rats to wheel about in. Aurora’s thrilling first entrance through the arcade upstage was partially blocked by the courtiers; they had nowhere else to stand. The Lilac Fairy’s boat, by which she conveys the Prince to the sleeping castle, was not only especially ugly but was too big in this context. One would have to see the production on a stage suited to it to know whether it’s a keeper.

Some questionable decisions have been made. Why has Ashton’s “Garland Dance” been thrown out and replaced by a fussy mishmash by Wheeldon? Why do we have a sketchy and feeble drop curtain at the start, in such contrast to the regal Messel look? Why, if you’re out to preserve and conserve, do you have to put your personal and irrelevant stamp on things?

But none of that constitutes the main issue. Alas, for all its earnestness and prettiness (and the costumes, at least, are very pretty), this Beauty is strangely pallid. The “Realized” sets seem dutiful (the third act looks positively skimpy)—there’s far more here of Farmer himself, and less Messel, than we’ve been led to believe; the classical approach to the fairy variations appeared to have been carefully learned for the occasion, not an expression of an inbred company style. The Carabosse (I saw Genesia Rosato) was less than menacing, at her best when emitting a soundless shriek of laughter. (You may prefer Carabosse en travesti, as I do, but we don’t have to go back further than Merrill Ashley or Lourdes Lopez in the Martins version to recall chilling performances by women; Mason herself was a superb Carabosse.) The Bluebird pas de deux was underpowered. The fairy-tale characters were game but limp. The Lilac Fairy was strongly danced by the talented Lauren Cuthbertson, but she lacked the magical womanly grace and authority with which Lilac rights the wrongs of the world.

And yet … the crucial element was there. Makarova once said, “Sleeping Beauty is a triumph of academic virtuosity, permeated with a youthful charm which a ballerina has to radiate.” The Aurora of Alina Cojocaru radiated youth, natural charm and—so important—ease. And her technique is solid. But there’s nothing solid about the way she dances: She’s light, quick, confident, both delicate and strong. Like Fonteyn, she’s instantly lovable—you see at once why her parents, the suitors, her friends, the courtiers, the fairies all care about her. And because you love her, it’s unbearable when Carabosse poisons her, even though you know that rescue, in the form of the Lilac Fairy, is on the way. Her Rose Adagio started wonderfully—the first turn relaxed and sure. There were one or two shaky moments, but they didn’t detract from the serene glow of happiness that she emanated. This, after all, is the moment when she’s taking her place in the world—it’s a birthday party, it’s an engagement party, it’s a celebration of the first step of a girl into womanhood. If the Rose Adagio is only a technical triumph, it’s empty, and The Sleeping Beauty is dead; Cojocaru makes us experience it as a burst of joy, not a challenge.

Her variation was pure and unforced, her danse-vertige moving, her Vision Scene romantic and alluring: Of course the Prince would fall instantly in love. And in the profound third-act pas de deux she was assured and brilliant, flinging herself into the famous fish-dives with gleeful abandon. What she lacks, for me, in this climax to the entire ballet is a new gravity and depth. A century has gone by, and she’s been wakened by the man she loves—she is a woman now. And she’s not only being married, she’s being crowned. Her world—our world—has been through an ordeal and survived, and she is the emblem of that survival. But she’s been reawakened to a new life, not her old one. If her “death” and rebirth don’t lead to a new understanding, a new maturity, it’s been a waste of a 100-year sleep.

I don’t as yet sense in Cojocaru an understanding of all this, but it will surely come. She is, with Diana Vishneva, one of the two most satisfying classical ballerinas in the world today. She has the looks, the talent and the opportunity—the company knew what it had from the start. We know that envy is one of the deadliest of the sins, but how can we not envy the Royal this enchanting Beauty?

That is, in fact, the subject of Sylvia, and indeed it's Ashton's great subject: Love conquers all. (You could say that Balanchine's great subject is Love eludes all.) In ballet after ballet, Ashton satisfies our need to believe in love's power-and demonstrates his own need to believe in it. And in Sylvia, as in La Fille Mal Gardée, The Dream, The Two Pigeons et al., the rapture of love finds its highest expression in a final ecstatic duet. Is there anything more tender, more moving, than the way Aminta, Sylvia's shepherd lover, gently places his hands on her temples to support her? It's so simple and personal, yet so original, that the first time you see it you almost gasp with pleasure.

If the actual story had the resonance of the subject, Sylvia would be a total masterpiece, like Fille. But entertaining as it is, this mock-heroic Arcadian romance about one of the goddess Diana's nymphs doesn't carry much weight. Its deepest lesson is taught in the first act, certainly the strongest of the three. Here we see the nymph as a bold huntress tauntingly shaking her bow at the statue of Eros that's presiding over the scene, and here we witness the futility of denying and defying love. After Sylvia's arrow "kills" Aminta, Eros' far more powerful arrow awakens Sylvia's heart. The extraordinary mastery that Ashton displays from the first moment, when six faun-like creatures cavort nimbly in the glade, to the last, when Sylvia has obeyed the inexorable commands of Eros, makes this act entirely satisfying-and, in a way, complete. Because, at this point, love has conquered all. From here on in, everything is mere plot.

Sylvia is based on the 1876 Paris Opéra ballet, made to the great score by Léo Delibes, the composer of Coppélia. The complicated story is from Tasso. Just after Sylvia succumbs to Aminta (and Eros), she's abducted by Orion, a wicked hunter, and carried off to his camp. There, disdainfully rejecting the jewels his concubines offer her, she wards off the lascivious Orion, leading him on while getting him drunk, and is eventually rescued by Eros. This is not promising material. There's a brilliant duet for Orion's two slaves and a happy chance for the ballerina to be sexy in a good cause, but the entire act is a serious let-down after the perfection and profundity of what's preceded it.

The final act is full to bursting, with three pairs of mythological figures (including Apollo and Terpsichore), a pair of frisky goats, the nine Muses, a batch of spring attendants, a batch of summer attendants, Sylvia's attendants, the chaste Diana (quite cross at Sylvia's transformation into a girl in love) with her attendants, a foursome of young trumpeters-yet even if it's overstuffed, it comes together through Ashton's genius for design and flow. Finally, Eros brings Diana to heel by reminding her of her own passion for Endymion. When even the chaste goddess bows to Eros, Love has conquered all-all over again.

With its wonderful music, moving subject, endless invention and extraordinary opportunities for a ballerina, Sylvia triumphed at the Met-not a surprise, since back in the 50's, when I last saw it, it was a rousing success here, appreciated more than it had been in England. But back then it had Fonteyn, and although each of the three Sylvias I saw last week was exemplary in her way, no one of them approached her in variety, musicality or simple radiant charm.

Gillian Murphy, a dancer of prodigious technique, was completely dominating; she's so strong that she's free to do anything, and her performance was open, large and compelling. I found her athleticism in Act I a little too overt, and she doesn't possess the full palette of feeling the role requires, but she gave a consummate performance, even if she wasn't a consummate Sylvia.

Michele Wiles was eager and appealing, if a little too coltish. The relish with which she attacked the role was charming and carried her through, but someone should explain to her that smiling is a crucial weapon in a dancer's armory when used strategically, not a state of being.

To my astonishment, Paloma Herrera, whose work I consistently resist, was in some ways the most satisfactory of the Sylvias. She's recovered from the distressing brittleness and weakness she was displaying several years ago, and she gave the subtlest response to the emotional progression of the role. If only she had Fonteyn's glorious line! And if only Murphy had Fonteyn's dramatic genius … and if only Wiles had Fonteyn's womanly magic ….

No matter. The full-length Sylvia, last performed in 1965, has been gloriously restored to us, and has given A.B.T. a bona fide hit. Basking in its glow, and grateful for the company's far-better-late-than-never embrace of Ashton over the past several years, we can forgive it all its Raymonda s and Eugene Onegin s (and worse)-particularly since we have the option of avoiding them.

The company's other big gamble of the season came directly on the heels of Sylvia and is more problematical. An all-Fokine evening? For all I know, the last such event at A.B.T. was the memorial program in the fall of 1942, shortly after Fokine's death. In a sense, the company owed everything to him-it was his participation at the very beginning, back in 1940, that legitimized Lucia Chase's audacious undertaking.

Les Sylphides, revolutionary back in 1909 when Diaghilev first brought it to the West, is now so overfamiliar that unless it's danced with exquisite feeling, it's soporific. The first cast this season was invigorated by Murphy's dynamic performance in the role originally danced by Pavlova. Here, her confidence and strength were beautifully shaded and restrained; this role can be a crucial passage for her from powerful virtuoso to artist. Stella Abrera, second-cast, was also highly effective-you can see her growing from season to season as she moves out of her exotica persona into the general repertory. The second cast also gave us an exquisite Zhong-Jing Fang in the Prelude.

As the Poet, both Maxim Beloserkovsky and Marcelo Gomes had a romantic presence, long, handsome legs and a becoming modesty-Gennadi Saveliev was perhaps more modest than necessary-but the otherworldly quality that we see in the photographs of Nijinsky was not in evidence. Best of all was the seriousness and commitment of the corps. They have a touch of stiffness that may well reflect their trying so hard, but far better earnestness than the listlessness that's infected so many Sylphides in the past.

The big test was Petrouchka, and the results were mixed. The production, overseen by Gary Chryst (a memorable Petrouchka in his Joffrey days), is highly lucid, full of careful detail and fun to watch. The set and costumes, after the originals by Alexandre Benois, were a touch too vivid-there could have been a little less vibrancy and a little more atmosphere. In the crowd scenes, you could tell that everyone was working to fulfill Fokine's demand that they all have individual and differentiated lives. Certain cameos stood out: Monique Meunier as the Chief Nursemaid; Carmen Corella as a Gypsy; Maria Riccetto as a Streetdancer; Danny Tidwell as the Devil; Buck Collins and Craig Salstein as the Grooms (Salstein also stood out as Sylvia's Eros). Chryst himself was a powerful and threatening presence as the Charlatan. (In the same role, Frederic Franklin, in his 90's, was in full control, if a little underpowered.)

But Petrouchka lives or dies by its three puppets. Amanda McKerrow, Xiomara Reyes and Abrera were cast as the Ballerina. None of them had the traditional red splotches of rouge on her cheeks, and none of them suggested the role's vacant coquettishness-they were simply vacant. The strongest of the Moors was Isaac Stappas, who conveyed the role's murderous brutality along with the stupidity and self-absorption. Gomes was less dangerous-an oaf rather than a killer.

Of the Petrouchkas, the most moving was Herman Cornejo, who, without oversentimentalizing, suggested a resigned desperation. But Petrouchka-part clown, part puppet, part tragic hero-requires a dramatic genius and rarely finds one, which leaves the ballet with a fatal weakness at its center. Stronger than any performance I've ever seen of the role is the photographic documentation of Nijinsky. (And why not try to reproduce his amazing makeup?)

The image of Nijinsky also hovers over Le Spectre de la Rose. Both Cornejo and Angel Corella have the bravura leaps and spins that the role of the Rose demands, yet they gave very different performances. Cornejo was more clean-cut, boyish; Corella more androgynous, Spectre-like (he was also a superb Aminta, but then he's a superb everything). The piece is pretty rickety, though, and no one dancing the Girl seemed to know what to do with her. Studying the Karsavina iconography might help. Karsavina coached Fonteyn in the role, but who is left who understands it? This is the problem with Fokine today-in his ballets, atmosphere and personality are everything. The actual steps can easily be taught, but the ambience of the Ballets Russes is a thing of the past.

Nothing makes this clearer than the final work on the A.B.T. program, the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin's opera Prince Igor. It's hard to believe, but in the first Diaghilev season, this was the piece that really ignited the audience. Today, it's not even living camp-it's dead camp. Did the sophisticated Parisians of 1909 really see in these ridiculous Tartar warriors, brandishing their bows as they charge downstage, all the splendor and barbarity of Mother Russia? Were the Princess and the Maidens, in their filmy harem costumes and their barest of midriffs, anything other than ludicrous, then as now? (Of course, we've been spoiled by Maria Montez in Cobra Woman.) Only Carlos Acosta as the Warrior Chieftain on the second night made anything of all this-he was so over the top in energy, thrust and slam-bang conviction that you could almost convince yourself there was something there (other than the theme of "Stranger in Paradise"). And then you looked around at all those nice young kids in their Robin-Hood-and-his-Merry-Men garb pretending to be Tartars, and the bubble burst. Exhuming Polovtsian Dances was a very bad idea.

So is Fokine viable today? On the whole, no. So-so Sylphides will come along regularly, and Petrouchka, Firebird, Spectre, The Dying Swan occasionally. Maybe someone will take a chance on Carnaval. But almost 100 years after Nijinsky, Pavlova and Karsavina, nearly all these works have lost their essence. On the final page of Fokine's memoirs, his son enjoins us not to "judge him by the posthumous representations of his work, but rather by the influence he exerted and the road he built for others to follow …. His ballets, like the Forum of Rome, will crumble and become isolated relics." Taking those words to heart, let us now join hands and pray that A.B.T. doesn't follow up the Polovtsian Dances with Schéhérazade.

How appropriate-and how welcome-has been Lincoln Center Festival's decision to celebrate Ashton so elaborately and generously: four companies sharing the honors, and several major works back in town after an absence of far too many years. But do we need the artificial boost of an anniversary to remind us of this great artist?

The highlights of the season were the Birmingham Royal Ballet's recensions of Enigma Variations and The Two Pigeons and the Royal's Scènes de Ballet and Cinderella . But let's dispose of the lowlights first, the lowest of which was the K-Ballet (of Tokyo) doing Rhapsody , a meretricious trifle Ashton made for Baryshnikov in 1980. More interesting from an historical point of view was Birmingham's version of the wartime Dante Sonata , an overwrought work in bare feet and flowing tresses set to some overexcited Liszt: The Children of Light battle the Children of Darkness. (It comes out a tie, but not before someone has been crucified.) This work struck me as wholly risible the only previous time it has been seen in America, during the first Sadler's Wells season in 1949-50, and I had hoped that either I or it had matured since then. But, no.

Of a different order of disappointment was the contribution of the Joffrey Ballet, which decades ago had a strong Ashton wing. The years have not been kind to the Joffrey, much as some loyalists would like to think otherwise. I found their Patineurs studied and joyless, its Boy in Blue, Masayoshi Onuki, too young, too spindly and too uncentered. Remember Baryshnikov? Bujones? The early Wedding Bouquet , with its oddly charming text by Gertrude Stein and its highly uncharming narration by Christian Holder, is very much a period piece: a rompy 19th-century wedding in the French countryside. The "slightly demented" Julia, a castoff of the "rakish" bridegroom, makes as much trouble as she can, while her friend Josephine gets tipsier and tipsier. Everyone rushes about, there are amusing moments, but all in all it comes across today as tiring, even tiresome. An Ashton masterpiece, Monotones I and II -each of its two plotless sections featuring only three dancers-is set to orchestrated piano pieces by Satie, and in its calm, compressed and mysterious way manages to suggest the workings of the universe. The company approached Monotones with due solemnity, but didn't do it full justice. I'm afraid the Joffrey is an idea whose time is gone.

The Birmingham Dante Sonata may have been a misfire, but their double bill of Enigma Variations and The Two Pigeons was a complete triumph. Enigma , created in 1968, is-like Wedding Bouquet and A Month in the Country -a company ballet, a story populated by a large group of individualized characters. In this case, they are Edward Elgar, the composer of the Variations , his wife, and the friends, associates and locals who drift in and out of their garden during a period of stress: Elgar is waiting for word from a great European conductor who either will or won't choose to premiere the very music we are listening to. The material of the ballet is mostly everyday-a girl in a hammock and her suitor; an eccentric visitor on a tricycle-yet Ashton imbues everything with his inexhaustibly rich humanity. There are not many moments in recent ballet as moving as the famous "Nimrod" variation in which, in the fading light, Elgar, his wife and his close companion A. J. Jaeger explore the essence and ambiguities of love and friendship. We are in Liebeslieder Waltzer country here-the heart lifted and transfixed with joy and pain. Joseph Cipolla and Silvia Jimenez as Elgar and his wife displayed the maturity and suppressed emotion the ballet requires; the entire company rose to the occasion. One shared in their relief and pleasure when the fatal telegram arrived-with good news!

As for Two Pigeons , with its delectable (and very danceable) André Messager score and its two real pigeons, how not to love it? The Young Man is an artist; the Young Girl is his model and his mistress. We're in their studio-in Paris, of course. She fidgets while posing; he's annoyed. Some Gypsies drop in, they whirl and twirl, and our boy falls for the Gypsy Girl-or at least for Adventure. Off he goes to their encampment, leaving his girl behind, in tears. Yes, there's too much Gypsy dancing in the second act-almost any amount of Gypsy dancing is too much-and it's more or less generic. But you're not supposed to take it seriously-until the hero is suddenly betrayed, cast off by his seductress and roughed up by those Romany swaggerers. Humiliated, he crawls home-the Prodigal Pigeon-where the Girl is waiting for him and forgives him, their reconciliation the occasion for one of Ashton's most ecstatic love duets. (How beautiful they all are, and how different-this one so touching; the one in The Dream so clearly ushering Titania and Oberon to bed; the one in Fille so ecstatic and big-hearted.) If there were any dry eyes in the Met when, at the end, the two pigeons flew back in and perched on the chair where boy and girl were entwined, mine were not among them. A sentimental valentine? Maybe. But what a corrective to the Children of Darkness!

The Two Pigeons was made in 1961 on Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, and to my knowledge no one has ever matched them in it. Even so, Robert Parker as the artist, all impatient and ardent youth, and Molly Smolen as a smoldering Gypsy Girl made particularly strong impressions. In the first performance, one of the pigeons made an unscripted appearance, but no harm was done.

Apart from the dreaded Marguerite and Armand -with the athletic dominatrix Guillem unable to convey any feeling at all as the dying courtesan, though she gave good cough-the Royal Ballet made a strong showing throughout the Festival's second week. Because it's been gone from New York for so long, we're unfamiliar with the company, except for a few of the principals. Darcey Bussell, for years a favorite, performed two pas de deux-beautiful as ever, holding her own technically, always pleasing, but to me more a gracious presence than an interesting dancer: She always reminds me of minor royalty acknowledging her subjects. The great pleasure of the season came from Alina Cojocaru, the ravishingly lovely girl from Romania via Kiev who became an instant star in London several years ago. She's the great hope of classical ballet today-exquisite, perfectly proportioned, technically impeccable, lovable, modest, brimming over with a pure love of dancing. She brought a light, happy virtuosity to Ashton's showoffy Voices of Spring pas de deux; she caught much of the elegant, edgy musicality of his most important Stravinsky piece, Scènes de Ballet ; and-most important-she found a way to animate the title role in his superb three-act version of Cinderella , the first full-evening ballet ever created in England. (It was made in 1948 for Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer.)

The singularity of this Cinderella is that its genius is invested less in the romantic action than in the magnificent architectural designs with which Ashton structured the big scenes, and with the comic play of the two stepsisters, who dominate so much of the proceedings. These sisters were danced for decades by Ashton himself and England's leading dramatic dancer, Robert Helpmann, who made them into silly, bickering, man-crazy zanies, far from malevolent, just ridiculous and even touching in their outrageous drag. No one else onstage could compete with them, and the material for Cinderella herself-a lot of waltzing around with a broom and dreaming of her late mother-seemed weak in comparison. The Prince is even more of a complete zero-on top of everything else, he has a dynamic Jester to upstage him. The Fairy Godmother, the Four Seasons whom she introduces to Cinderella with a series of enchanting variations, their cavaliers, the 12 Stars (or Hours) for whom Ashton created thrilling group passages, even the be-robed and bewigged courtiers are more consistently gripping than the central couple, whose climactic Act II ballroom duet is undermined by the stridencies of the score-Prokofiev's music here at odds with the action.

Cojocaru's shining radiance triumphed over the thinness of the material. The tribulations of Cinderella's situation, not all that severe to begin with, hardly penetrate her happy nature and goodness. Cojocaru's unforced technique-those glittering yet easy piqué turns, those 180-degree arabesque penchées that never look forced or acrobatic, just a natural expression of her generosity of spirit-seems always a reflection of her inner self. She's completely lovable, exactly the way you want Cinderella to be. And like her characterization, her musicality is fresh and simple rather than subtle and witty. Because she and her Danish partner, the elegant and spirited Johan Kobborg, are so felicitously matched, such a glowing pair, they held the audience enraptured, at least partly reclaiming Cinderella for Cinderella.

There were two other Cinderellas: the nuanced and intelligent but uncharismatic Leanne Benjamin and the very fine Tamara Rojo, who is the Royal's only legitimate young rival to Cojocaru. Rojo is a strong and convincing classicist, and in the ballroom scene she was very beautiful, with her lovely body and legs and her purity of approach. But she was not only joyless, she was affectless-more like a girl in a vision scene, disembodied, than a girl who has been magically transported to a palace ball and has fallen in love. But then who could blame her, given the clunkiness of Iñaka Urlezaga, her stolid Prince?

The chief pair of sisters were two Royal favorites of the past, Anthony Dowell and the onetime dynamo character dancer Wayne Sleep. They went all the way-and then some. Lots of pratfalls and knockabout pranks, but sly sweetness was sacrificed to crass farce. The ravishing solos for the four Seasons, with their soft port de bras and surprising lunges and shifts, were so wonderful to watch that you could forgive the inconsistent level of performance. And the new production, though more than a touch glitzy, didn't get in the way. Cinderella emerged a big winner.

But the biggest winner, of course, was Ashton himself. Though we see him so intermittently in America, we begin to think we understand him. There is the love of music, the endless felicity of invention, the signature steps and style. But most of all, I think, we love his love of love. Balanchine told us that ballet was woman; Ashton tells us that ballet is woman and man, in intimacy, passion, playfulness, sensuality. There must be more kisses in Fille Mal Gardée and The Two Pigeons than in all of Balanchine put together, because what moves Ashton-and us-is love fulfilled. Which is why, in this post-ironic, postmodern world, we need him more than ever.

Last year's big hit was V , set to Schumann's great piano quintet. I resisted it then; this time round, I was roused by the final movement, with its dynamic if sometimes corny affirmations of humanity (all that hugging). Am I going to come to like this very ambitious piece backwards, movement by movement? Maybe. But I suspect that when I back into the second movement (all that crawling), I'll still be irritated by the heavy literalness of its response to the music. For me, even the parts of V I like seem superfluous-the music says it all. But for all its deficiencies, V is a big and heartfelt statement. This season's four new works are modest in intention and modest in accomplishment.

The new work suggests that Morris is currently coming from two directions, East and West. Serenade -dedicated to the composer, the recently deceased Lou Harrison-and Kolam , with strong music by Zakir Hussain and Ethan Iverson, are Asian-inflected. Or, to put it another way, like the Javanese World Power seen two years ago, they are products of what skeptics might call the divine afflatus that rolls in from the East.

Serenade , this year's Mark Morris solo, is divided into five sections, in each of which he deploys a different object. In the first, it's a box on which he's sitting; in the second, a length of brass pipe, which he (very slowly) presents to the audience. In the third, it's a small fan (it goes nicely with the long black skirt and white blouse that Isaac Mizrahi has outfitted Morris in). In the fourth, it's finger cymbals. In the fifth, it's castanets. Needless to say, Morris has mastered the techniques these props demand, but the section I found most effective was the first, in which he's seated on his box and moves only from the waist up. Here, his control and intensity are most evident; despite his advancing years and girth, the power of his gestures and poses is undiminished. How fortunate for this aging great dancer that he can choreograph for himself to his strengths, whereas Mikhail Baryshnikov, that greatest of dancers, has to depend on, say, Eliot Feld, whose current season he is now ornamenting.

If Serenade is vaguely Balinese, Kolam is specifically Indian. The curtain rises on a striking backdrop-a huge painting with broad, almost brutal, horizontal strokes, by Howard Hodgkin. One girl can be spotted in the dark downstage left. She's upside-down in what friends more attuned than I am to the mysteries of the East assure me is a yoga posture. Soon we are seeing other dancers in another yoga position, hands and feet on the floor, bodies arched upwards in an inverted V. For a while, it looked as if Kolam was going to be a series of variations on these shapes, an interesting switch from the usual variations on specific movements, but that turned out to be my idea, not Morris'. His ballet turns into a complicated adventure in patterning, mostly (and surprisingly) symmetrical. The program notes explain: " Kolam is the Tamil word for the art of decorating courtyards, walls, and places of worship using powders to draw intricate designs." Which is why Kolam seems more decorative than anything else. It doesn't add up, it just keeps prettily going.

The other two new works represent the other conspicuous strain in Morris' recent development: He's co-opting a number of Western cultural artifacts from the 1920's and 30's, trying to make them his own. His recension of Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) several years ago was a case in point. This season, he appropriated Richard Rodgers' Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1936) and the once-celebrated Edith Sitwell/William Walton Façade (1923). Is it accidental that until now these works have been associated with George Balanchine-who first choreographed Slaughter for the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes -and Frederick Ashton, whose 1931 ballet to Façade was an early signature piece for the Sadler's Wells (now Royal) Ballet? And is this meant as an hommage or a challenge? If the latter, Balanchine and Ashton have nothing to worry about.

The piece to Slaughter is called Resurrection , and it's parody-pastiche: Lots of showbizzy mannerisms, with a central couple-Okamura and Bradon McDonald-who end up dead (slaughtered) yet not dead (resurrected). It's bright and cheerful and clever, as when a bevy of showgirls lying in a circle on the floor kick up their legs-they're supine Rockettes. And it's fun to watch the deceased Okamura tippy-toeing backwards through the oblivious chorus boys and girls. But if you know the Balanchine version-and it's hard not to, since it's constantly on view at City Ballet and elsewhere-it's almost impossible to get it out of your head. And why would you want to?

Ashton's Façade , although Sadler's Wells used to bring it here 50 or so years ago, is far less well known than the Sitwell poems and the Walton score. In the late 40's and early 50's, they were immensely chic-I can remember at college gloating over the LP of Sitwell intoning her poems, and even memorizing some of their more outré lines. (Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett were other British imports of the day, and, of course, this is when Sadler's Wells first appeared in America.) Façade is cultural history, and Mark Morris has pounced on it wittily, though I don't understand why he's renamed it Something Lies Beyond the Scene . (When he changes a title, does he think he makes the work his own?) Morris and three of his dancers stand in the pit reciting the poems, and the rest of the company acts them out onstage in an oddly literal way, becoming birds, trees, an elephant, etc., as the poetry suggests these images. This piece is charmingly inventive, and that's about it

As for Maile Okamura, she is a slight, lithe, dark-haired beauty-a compellingly vivid presence whatever she's doing, and she was doing just about everything. She has attack, grace, charm-and that unmistakable quality that is dance charisma: Your eyes seek her out and stay on her. But the whole company was looking wonderful-gorgeous Julie Worden (a terrific cowgirl in the revival of Going-Away Party ), pint-sized Lauren Grant, impressive Amber Merkens, stalwart Marjorie Folkman, omnipresent skinny John Heginbotham, and on and on. They clearly love dancing what Morris gives them to dance, and he reciprocates by helping them look so good.

But he himself seems to have reached a difficult moment in his creative life. It's clear now that he hopes to absorb everything in the universe, but his response to his latest interests is less full and resonating than his response in his early years to the work of Handel, Bach, Vivaldi, Purcell, Monteverdi. Their music, you feel, is where he really lives-there, and in those scores that nourish his lifelong passion for folk dancing.

Mark Morris is now at the age Balanchine was when New York City Ballet came into existence, with Apollo , Serenade , Concerto Barocco , Symphony in C behind him and 35 years of masterpieces to go. Balanchine also devoured genres, but it was always the dance possibilities in specific pieces of music that compelled him. Although Morris is famously musical, he seems today to be primarily propelled less by music than by his large intellectual appetite: He throws himself at new enthusiasms, digests them, and moves on. This season suggests, at least to me, that he doesn't yet know what he's moving on to. He's as fecund as ever, and as fluent, but not as focused.

This is not the conventional Fille that A.B.T. was trotting out in the 70's, a production that had nothing to recommend it but the star power of Makarova, Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland. This is Ashton's great reinvention of 1960, in which the traditional French tale of young lovers triumphing over parental disapproval is transmuted into a glorious English pastoral, reflecting, as Ashton wrote, an "eternally late spring … of perpetual sunshine and the humming of bees-the suspended stillness of a Constable landscape of my beloved Suffolk, luminous and calm." Above all, it's a ballet about love: Lise and Colas' love for each other, of course, but also the love that is so touchingly indicated between Lise and her mother, the Widow Simone, who is determined to marry off her daughter to the zany, rich simpleton, Alain; the love of the strutting cockerel for his four hens, of Alain for his red umbrella, and underlying the entire ballet, the love of dancing which redeems everyone and everything. Even when the Widow is at her crossest with her wayward daughter, she can be coaxed into her joyful clog dance or will snatch up a tambourine to get Lise up on her toes. And poor abject Alain, disdained by Lise, will brighten at the sound of a flute and burst into his brilliant parody of classical dance. He may be a fool, but he's a dancing fool. As for the chickens, they were born to dance.

Ashton, I suspect, was partly drawn to Fille by his lifelong adoration of Anna Pavlova, in whose repertory it was featured for many years. But it was that other great Russian ballerina, Tamara Karsavina, who in her old age taught him the brilliant mime passage from the Petipa version in which Lise, believing herself alone, acts out her dream of being married, being pregnant and having babies-one, two, three! Ashton's Fille , then, is a French story told in an English spirit with Russian connections.

There was one Russian Lise in the four casts A.B.T. presented-the formidable Bolshoi star Nina Ananiashvili-and although she's somewhat mature to be playing the very young Lise, in the rapturous pas de deux that brings the love story to its climax, she demonstrated the command of a true ballerina, dominating the audience rather than appealing to it. But the success of Fille ultimately depends on the degree of sympathy between the lovers. First-cast Ashley Tuttle and Ethan Stiefel are both impeccable classical dancers but, as they used to say, they come from two different worlds: She's delicate, romantic, womanly; he's a horny kid. The perfectly matched couple were Xiomara Reyes and Angel Corella, at first childlike and shy in their feelings for each other, then growing-like a Romeo and Juliet for whom things work out happily-from puppy love to tender and satisfied passion. Where Stiefel was randy, Corella was ardent.

The final pairing gave us Gillian Murphy-at last promoted to principle rank-and Maxim Belotserkovsky, and what they projected was glowing youth. The intricacies of the ribbon dances were easily dealt with by Murphy's rock-solid technique, and the barnyard high jinks-churning the butter, sampling the porridge, trying to sneak out the gate to get to the boyfriend-allowed her to relax into her open American niceness. Belotserkovsky is good to look at, with his endlessly long legs and handsome features-think Cyd Charisse-but he's an under-energized dancer and not what you'd call an actor. It was Ananiashvili's partner, Carlos Acosta-A.B.T.'s latest Hispanic import-who caused the biggest stir. He's big, strong, centered, accurate, engaging-a Cuban black with lots of experience and charisma. In Fille , though, his acting was limited to The Shrug and The Grin.

All three of the Widows-Victor Barbee, Kirk Peterson and Guillaume Graffin-were funny and touching; the drag is good-natured, not campy. The Alains were more variable: Joaquin De Luz dancing up a storm but too relentlessly chipper; Carlos Lopez unformed; only Herman Cornejo subtly identifying the sadness as well as the goofiness in this brilliant creation. But although Alain is a disappointed suitor, won't he really be happier with his umbrella than he would have been with Lise? So there's a happy ending for everyone-except for those like me who, after five performances, were left pining for more. This production, staged by Alexander Grant (the original Alain), Christopher Carr and Grant Coyle, is markedly superior to the Royal Ballet's. Well, London's loss is our gain. Ashton's La Fille Mal Gardée is a great work of art; in its generosity of spirit, its belief in the power of love and the power of dance, its humanity and decency, its innocent sexuality, it shines like a good deed in a bad world.

In the years immediately following Fille , Ashton went on expressing his love for love-in the enchanting The Two Pigeons (1961), the overwrought Marguerite and Armand (1963) and, in 1964, the radiantly beautiful The Dream , the first ballet made on Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley. Mr. Dowell (now Sir Anthony) worked with Christopher Carr on staging and coaching The Dream for A.B.T., and the result is another miracle of recreation, authentic but not slavish. When the curtain goes up on David Walker's exquisite forest glade and the 16 fairies rush on in their beautiful bell-shaped skirts, their hair piled up behind their coronets, you're in enchanted territory. The choreography here is so fluent, so charged, so natural, that even before the entrances of Oberon and Titania and Puck, of the star-crossed lovers, of Bottom and his gang, you know you're in the hands of a master.

Balanchine's Midsummer Night's Dream , choreographed two years before Ashton's version, is about contest: The battle between the king and queen of the fairies over her little page is prolonged and serious, and Oberon practically gloats over his victory-this is a relationship in trouble. (The misunderstandings among the humans also cut deep.) In Ashton's Dream , Oberon never ceases to love his queen; you can sense his rueful ambivalence over the trick he's played on her. Their quarrel is only a pretext: Its real function is to serve as foreplay to the ecstatic duet at the end that signals their passionate and melting reconciliation. In contrast, the squabbling humans are close to caricature in their Victorian costumes and posturings-Lysander and Demetrius in their velvet frock coats and pugilistic standoffs, Hermia and Helena with their tiffs and makeup kisses-while putting the transformed Bottom on pointe underlines what an oddball donkey he is, not a semi-tragic one, like Balanchine's.

It was gratifying to see how this Dream gave nourishment to so many of A.B.T.'s dancers. Oberon seems to me Stiefel's finest role: It accords with his somewhat arrogant demeanor and gives him superb opportunities to show off his transparent classicism-those whip-clear turns and elegant jumps-without demanding the kind of realistic acting he can't pull off. Belotserkovsky's technique and strength weren't up to the job-and why expose a non-turner to this role so dependent on fast turns? But the nature of Acosta's technique matches the fierce demands on Oberon, and he helps Julie Kent, so bland usually, reveal a new sexiness and playfulness as Titania. She's generally partnered by the slightly built Corella; Acosta's massiveness brought out an appealing delicacy. Amanda McKerrow was underpowered as Titania (opposite Belotserkovsky), but Alessandra Ferri, also approaching the end of her career, has retained enough of her ballerina strengths to make a satisfying pairing with Stiefel.

As for the fiendishly demanding role of Puck-darting, crouching, leaping, spinning-it gave further opportunities to the company's two brilliant little guys, De Luz and Cornejo. A.B.T. has now what practically amounts to a monopoly on first-rate male dancers-it's almost unfair of them to add Acosta to the mix. But he's of a different breed from a Stiefel or a Corella; like Jose Manuel Carreño, whom he's presumably being groomed to spell, he's a grown-up.

For these two weeks of Ashton we can forgive A.B.T. their dopey Tchaikovsky-snippets program and even the pernicious Onegin . I don't know why they chose to invest this heavily in Ashton at this moment; I only know he's made them a powerful contender.

The highlight of the workshop, though, was a new ballet by Melissa Barak, a 21-year-old member of City Ballet's corps. Choreographers are born, not made, and they're born all too rarely. On the basis of her first ballet before the public, Telemann Overture Suite in E Minor, we can see that this young woman commands the fundamentals: She responds to music appropriately but not slavishly, she has an easy flow of dance ideas, her dancers always seem to be in the right place without strain-she thinks spatially. The ballet uses an unusual combination of dancers: eight girls and four boys in the corps, and two girls as soloists (of course, the school has a preponderance of girls, but Ms. Barak has made a virtue of necessity). Being a baroque ballet in Balanchine's world, Telemann Overture necessarily evokes his Concerto Barocco and Square Dance, yet it doesn't imitate them, and though its vocabulary is restricted, it never seems constricted. In other words, this ballet is not just promising, it's accomplished. Happily, Peter Martins has commissioned a ballet from her for the company. If her promise is realized, and if Christopher Wheeldon continues to develop, the creative bleakness at City Ballet may actually be drawing to a close.

But the main ballet event of the season recently took place at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.: a week of Britain's Royal Ballet in an all-Ashton repertoire; alas, the company is skipping New York entirely on this tour. Frederick Ashton, one of the greatest of all choreographers, has suffered neglect on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years, so the opportunity to see three of his masterpieces, plus several less important works, was a rare and golden one. There was much sentimental to-do about Anthony Dowell retiring as director after 15 years. Although he's been sharply criticized for the condition of the company, now that he's leaving, and with the not-very-highly-regarded Ross Stretton arriving from Australia to replace him, we had tributes galore, plus a "surprise" appearance by the 58-year-old Mr. Dowell himself (with his great partner, 62-year-old Antoinette Sibley) in Les Soupirs, a trifle Ashton concocted for them in 1980. Onetime lovers meet unexpectedly at a park bench. They remember, they regret, they part. She was in heeled shoes, not on pointe; he has lost his spring. But both of them retain their beautiful carriage and their emotional conviction. The audience dutifully responded.

We were also served up another duet made for the Dowell-Sibley partnership, the Thaïs pas de deux. The guy-in this case, hunky Adam Cooper of the all-male Swan Lake and Billy Elliot-stands in a daze and a scoop neckline while his muse (Leanne Benjamin) bourrées in beneath a veil. The veil is shed, she does various things with and to him culminating in a kiss, the veil is back on, and she bourrées off. There was no magic, no erotic charge, between these two; it's hard to believe this was ever a convincing piece.

Equally corny and much longer is the famous Marguerite and Armand, which Ashton made in 1960 for Fonteyn and Nureyev. This is a flashback ballet-the Lady of the Camellias is dying on a sofa, remembering. It took Garbo to turn Camille into something wonderful, and it took Fonteyn and Nureyev to do the same for this creaky vehicle. The ballet has been revived for the famous (in some circles, infamous) Sylvie Guillem. She is many things-athletic, energetic, ambitious, intense. What she isn't is moving. And her partner, Nicolas Le Riche, is certainly not Nureyev. Without performers of genius, Marguerite and Armand is just shallow kitsch.

The meat of the Royal season was three major works. Les Rendezvous, from 1933, is one of Ashton's great charmers. It begins with a bang-the girls of the corps hurling themselves onstage from the wings in big jetés-and it never lets up. The Ashton trademarks are all there: the detailed port de bras, the stabbing footwork, the enchanting flicks of the wrist, the lovely open lifts. For decades Les Rendezvous was performed in a garden setting, and the girls wore conventionally pretty garden-party get-up. Now we have an abstract sky with a gigantic moon that changes color from orange to blue to yellow, sketchy cut-out pine trees (Matisse on a bad day), and the girls' dresses splotched with big pastel polka dots. The human scale so quintessential to Ashton's work is dissipated by the set, and the dancing is blurred by the excesses of the costuming. Why can't artistic directors leave well enough alone?

Luckily, no one has dreamed of rethinking Symphonic Variations, Ashton's "signature" ballet. Made in 1946, Symphonics is a distillation of everything Ashton felt about pure classical ballet. Although the dance's demands on its three couples are fiendishly difficult-everything exposed, and with no moments of rest offstage-the feeling is always one of calm, focus, simplicity. Because of its hallowed place in British dance, there's a danger (and this is just as true of Balanchine's Concerto Barocco in America) that it will be performed over-solemnly. The first cast in Washington did it credit with its three strong ballerinas-Sarah Wildor, Tamara Rojo and, in the Fonteyn role, the very young Alina Cojocaru (she's just turned 20). She may have been a touch subdued, but this girl has everything-she's beautiful, exquisitely proportioned, modest, glowing, with an abundant musicality and an expansive joy to her movement. A few weeks ago in London I saw her in what was only her second Giselle, and immediately it was clear why she's become a principal-and a star-overnight. How Ashton would have adored her!

The great happiness of the Royal season, came from the four performances of Ashton's most beloved and richest creation, his version of the 1789 La Fille Mal Gardée. The plot is standard 18th century-young Colas and Lise in love, thwarted by a parent's ambitions, then united. In other versions of the ballet, like the one Baryshnikov and Makarova and Kirkland used to struggle to animate at A.B.T., the plot is a bore. But there isn't a boring moment in Ashton's two acts from the instant the curtain goes up and dawn is heralded by the hilarious dance for a cockerel and his four hens. (Real roosters and hens, with their strut, their angularities, their fluster, would dance this way if only they could dance.) Although formally set in France, Fille is from start to finish a rapturous-and closely observed-evocation of the English bucolic life Ashton so loved.

Lise and Colas must be the most wholesomely and tenderly sexy couple in ballet; they never stop kissing. (When Ethan Steifel, on loan from A.B.T., peeked up Sarah Wildor's skirt during the maypole dance, he broke the spell of innocence; isn't he getting a little old to keep parading his naughtiness?) The lovers' scenes deepen from light-hearted flirtation through the famous intricate ribbon dance to their last-act triumphant bridal pas de deux. (They've inadvertently been locked in Lise's bedroom together, and it's clear what kind of triumph they've been having. And how Ashton loves their love!) The comic characters, too, are consummate creations. The Widow Simone, in her lovable drag, isn't a mere plot convention: She cherishes her daughter even as she tries to discipline her and, best of all, she's always ready to dance-her exuberant clog dance is one of the glories of the ballet. Alain, the rich pretender to Lise's hand, is a true zany-a would-be Marx Brother who's another dancing fool. Though his steps parody the ballet's radiant classicism, they're goofy, not ugly, so Alain is lovable, too.

The riches of Ashton's Fille are inexhaustible. The talent of the current Royal company isn't. Apart from Alina Cojocaru, no one really stands out, and the famous Royal Ballet style is in general a thing of the past. But despite unevenness of casting and style, it was wonderful to have this Fille back with us. The good news is that A.B.T. is taking it into the repertory next year. The mystery is why, given the frantic scramble for repertory all over the world, companies aren't grabbing Ashton's Les Patineurs, Two Pigeons, The Dream, Monotones, Symphonic Variations, Les Rendezvous. Their day is bound to come.