From all the fuss on the opening night of this English National Ballet season you would think that the only selling point was Karl Lagerfeld’s new tutu for The Dying Swan. But in fact this season has a far more special reason for being: it celebrates the centenary of the Ballets Russes, the legendary Paris-based company led by Serge Diaghilev. ENB is the British ballet company with the greatest claim to a Ballets Russes heritage: its founders, Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, both danced for Diaghilev. So it’s right that ENB marks the anniversary with two mixed programmes that pay tribute to the Ballets Russes.

The first opens with Apollo, created by Balanchine to a score by Stravinsky. It was a landmark in 1928 and is extraordinarily fresh and modern 80 years later. Thomas Edur and Agnes Oaks, both wearing chic white costumes designed by Lagerfeld, led the opening night cast. Oaks produced a Terpsichore of innate grace, while Edur offered a manly Apollo, as strong of mind as he is of body. Happily, ENB has also added a staircase for the final ascent to Mt Parnassus, a definite improvement.

Two guest artists from the Australian Ballet, Gina Brescianini and Daniel Gaudiello, came over to dance Fokine’s Le Spectre de la Rose (capably but without much distinction), while David Dawson offered a world premiere inspired by an iconic Diaghilev ballet. Dawson’s Faun(e) is set to the same Debussy music (here played by two onstage pianists) as Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912), but beyond riffing on the theme of narcissism there’s no discernible link. Dawson’s rippling phrases and winding geometries look fabulous but feel empty, though Esteban Berlanga and Raphaël Coumes-Marquet (a guest from Dresden) danced brilliantly.

The company pulled out all the stops in Schéhérazade, Fokine’s exuberant erotic melodrama. Elena Glurdjidze, as Zobeide, and Dmitri Gruzdyev, as the Golden Slave, seized the opportunity to step outside the bounds of propriety. Glurdjidze was affecting as the lustful harem wife who learns the shocking price of disobedience, while Gruzdyev’s Slave matched her desire with a muscular liquidity and keen sexual engagement. What a shame that the anaemic sets, a pale shadow of Bakst’s past glories, couldn’t rise to the occasion, or that the hideous lighting cast such an unfortunate tint on the ensemble.

And that Lagerfeld tutu? It proved a case of feathery overkill, with a bulging bodice and a strangulating neckline. How Glurdjidze managed such a convincing performance of Fokine’s Dying Swan (not a ballet, by the way, one associates with the Ballets Russes) in that tutu is beyond me.

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