The versions of The Sleeping Beauty (in 1999) and La Bayadère (at this month’s Lincoln Center Festival 2002) that the Kirov Ballet has brought to New York have been notable for their attempt to re-create the classic late-19th-century productions of tsarist Russia. Swan Lake, on the other hand, always seems to rise above matters of mime and murder. Perhaps that’s because there’s so much matter: Prince Siegfried with his crossbow (given to him by his mother) tensed before the swan corps; the good girl/bad girl of Odette/Odile; the good guy/bad guy of Siegfried/Rothbart; the split between soul and sex, love and lust.

The Kirov production of Swan Lake that I saw last Saturday afternoon was shaped by one-time company artistic director Konstantin Sergeyev, so no surprise that it’s similar to the one Boston Ballet has been presenting for the past decade — next to the Kevin McKenzie Swan Lake at American Ballet Theatre or the Royal Ballet version that came to Boston last summer, these two look like twins. The Kirov does maintain the Soviet tradition of no unhappy endings, so whereas Boston’s Odette and Siegfried jump into the lake and reappear in Swan Heaven, the Kirov pair are redeemed when their love breaks Rothbart’s spell. This idea reflects the way Tchaikovsky’s music breaks through into B major, though it requires the lovers to renounce their dark side. The other major difference was the sets. The Kirov’s first-act " park " has Boston Ballet’s Watteau sensibility but with a faded, Maurice Sendak–like foliage and the royal castle in the distance (a blunder that sabotages the park/forest metaphor for the freeing of Siegfried’s sexual desire). Subdued lighting turns this into the gloomy lake of acts two and four. Act three in the castle has an autumnal feel with a huge tapestry or frieze as backdrop, a throne with a baldachin, and four heralds raised aloft.

And the Kirov itself in 2002? To judge from this production (and from that of George Balanchine’s Jewels, which I saw Saturday evening), this could be the Bordeaux of ballet companies: it’s soft, subtle, and superbly finished, with vanilla accents but not a lot of oak or tannin. The orchestra has the characteristic Russian sound, with quacking oboes and nasal horns; conductor Boris Gruzin took some tempos to dramatic extremes (the languid second-act pas de deux worked for me, the frenetic third-act mazurka did not) but didn’t always give phrases the weight their harmonic structure called for (when, for instance, Siegfried runs out at the end of the first act). Weight was also absent from the look of the first act: though Siegfried’s party guests filled the big Metropolitan Opera stage, they didn’t focus their energy on one another (making fun of the prince’s tutor so halfheartedly it seemed an afterthought), and there was too much emotional empty space in both the waltz and the polonaise. Yet the corps, like the " superhuman " women of Yeats’s " Under Ben Bulben, " " air in immortality. " Ensemble was fabulous — in act two they moved like one gigantic swan. Boston Ballet doesn’t have this kind of ballon, either: in act four the big swans (helped here by Gruzin’s flowing tempo) landed light as a feather.

The weight came from Veronica Part’s Odette. Although much has been made of the height of the Kirov’s young ballerinas, Part didn’t seem especially tall, but she turned her physical presence into emotional presence, in act two emphasizing her three-dimensionality and thus her independence. She had a sensuous volume; when she stretched, she seemed to be luxuriating in silk sheets. For her Odile, however, Part had only the extroverted twin of her Odette to offer, without the requisite bad-girl attitude (somebody get her a copy of Anna Karenina, or at least a Madonna video); her fouettés lacked momentum, and there was only token rapacity in her final run at Siegfried. Indeed, she hardly glanced at him, perhaps because Danila Korsuntsev, looking stranded between Rock Hudson and Prince Charles, was all technique (and that not always impeccable) and no temperament. Andrei Ivanov’s jester was no better: his tours à la seconde were faster than you would think humanly possible, but he wasn’t funny, or even personable.

Like Gruzin with his cadential underlining of phrase endings, this Swan Lake tended to preen and pose. It looked great but it didn’t always move. And the perfunctory nature of the last act — where Siegfried’s " discovery " of Odette and his battle with Rothbart seemed truncated — was underlined that evening by the performance of Diamonds, which glittered like Swan Lake’s true conclusion.