They saved the best till last. At the tail end of a long visit - all six programmes and three packed weeks of it - the Bolshoi danced The Bright Stream, and you think: "This a great ballet, a great, glorious, sweet, sunny, funny ballet that gently reveals love's follies in all their baffling, maddening detail."
The Bright Stream is about different sorts of couples and different sorts of love - misguided, misplaced and true. There's the old couple, unwilling to grow old, the ardent young man who woos too keenly and the married man who doesn't know his luck.
There is cross-dressing, mistaken identities, multiple trysts, phoney duels, a man dressed as a ballerina merrily being a swan (think Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot) and a very foxy Natalia Osipova dressed as a boy.
There are also some great ballet gags, including the sheer barking absurdity of women as sylphs.
This may not sound promising but The Bright Stream is set on a collective farm in Soviet Russia. It was first made in 1935, and almost instantly banned by the Communists.
Seventy-or-so years later it was remade by Alexei Ratmansky, then a freelance choreographer, and soon to become the Bolshoi's new and very successful director. Ratmansky, who has both a sense of humour and a way with steps, made his Stream with a nod to Shakespeare's Dream and a wink to La Fille mal Gardée. It is easily the best new story ballet for a very, very long time, and Ratmansky deserves all the laurels.
Mind you, he had a cracking cast last night. Natalia Osipova, the star of the season, was wondrous as the Ballerina, as was Ekaterina Krysanova as her old school friend who stays at home rather than explore the big bad world.
Andrei Merkuriev was her clot of a husband who sees her charms only when he mistakes her for someone else, while Sergei Filin was a dashing Dancer, partner-in-jinks to Osipova's Ballerina.
Also excellent was Gennady Yanin as the Accordion-player, a lover so ardent that he terrifies both his sweetheart and the wolf, the fairytale character who usually does the scaring.
Until 18 Aug. Information: 0870 145 0200, www.eno.org/bolshoi.
VIctor Hochhauser Presents The Bolshoi Ballet: The Bright Stream
London Coliseum
St Martin's Lane, WC2N 4ES
