It may not be the most adventurous way to open a new Covent Garden season, but the Royal Ballet's luminous staging of Swan Lake is certainly the popular option. For Anthony Dowell's production (now 21 years old) offers the ultimate classical experience, with the sights and sounds of a proud 19th-century tradition running at full throttle. Fancy a romantic tragedy in a tutu? Then this is the ballet for you.

Dowell was careful to honour (as far as possible) the choreographic text of Petipa and Ivanov's 1895 St Petersburg staging, though additional contributions from Ashton and Bintley are included. The production as a whole is beautifully formed and dramatically convincing, especially the “white acts”, the lakeside scenes in which Siegfried encounters his beloved Odette. Yolanda Sonnabend's grand designs are a tribute to Fabergé and Tsarist Russian fashion (though I do wish the Swans wore tutus instead of those shabby skirts). And as conducted by Boris Gruzin on opening night, the sweeping Tchaikovsky score is as potent and appealing as ever.

Swan Lake showcases the breadth and depth of a company; and on opening night the Royal came up trumps. The cast was led by the company's two resident lovebirds (both on and off stage), Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares. As Odette, Nuñez's embrace of the poetic choreography was physically unhurried and emotionally unbridled. It was almost as if the dance couldn't contain the burden that her princess, trapped in a swan's body by Von Rothbart's evil spell, has to carry. Her Act II pas de deux with Soares's Siegfried was meltingly lovely, her lifts floated in his arms. Hard to believe that this was the same ballerina who emerged triumphant in Act III as the seductress Odile. Looking spectacular in her black tutu and dazzling us with the hauteur and precision of her bravura dancing, Nuñez's Odile toyed with her Prince's affections like a cat tormenting a mouse. Soares, who has lengthened the line of his dancing to most handsome effect, presented a Siegfried so smitten - and so wounded by regret - that it made sense for him to follow Odette into certain suicide if it meant they could be united in death. And praise, too, for the corps, who made us feel the sorrow and anger of the Swans' collective misfortune.

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