They come in peace and vests

The Ballets of Fokine and Kirov Masterclass | <i>Royal Opera House</i>

There can't be many occasions when the orchestra of the Maryinsky Theatre of St Petersburg has been required to play "God Save The Queen". It's hardly a score they keep with them for emergencies. Yet someone managed to rustle up the parts at absurdly short notice when a certain 100-year-old lady decided to spend her birthday night watching the Kirov Ballet.

There can't be many occasions when the orchestra of the Maryinsky Theatre of St Petersburg has been required to play "God Save The Queen". It's hardly a score they keep with them for emergencies. Yet someone managed to rustle up the parts at absurdly short notice when a certain 100-year-old lady decided to spend her birthday night watching the Kirov Ballet.

Despite the unscheduled nature of the visit, there was a certain logic to it. It was the first night of the Kirov's presentation of four ballets by Mikhail Fokine - works created between 1909 and 1911 for Serge Diaghilev's revolutionary Ballets Russes seasons in Paris and Monte Carlo. He showed them in London too. And in 1912 the young Elizabeth was there.

How much HRH remembers of what she saw aged 11 or 12 is not the point. The very fact of a living connection with works that rocked public perception of dance and music and stage design affects the way we see and hear them now. The profound novelty of Stravinsky's music for Petrushka - the buzzing business of melodic strands, the stark trumpet attack that describes Petrushka's desperate state, its sheer textural complexity - is barely dimmed after 90 years.

Sadly, the choreography the Kirov dances is not Fokine's, but a version based on it. And added double tours-en-l'air and other spectacular steps from the 19th century's bag of tricks make the whole thing look less modernist than it should. Still, the production contains much of the original's folkloric colour and detail - including a vodka-swigging bear in the marketplace and a mountebank with a 12ft beard. And in the face of such zest and flair - and magnificent playing from the Kirov orchestra - it seems churlish to niggle at the text.

But with its Le Spectre de la Rose the company achieves the sense of opening a long-closed box to release a heady scent. Of the evening's four ballets this, I'd guess, is the one the Queen Mother is most likely to have seen in 1912, danced by Nijinsky and Karsavina. And if today the sight of a man in rose-pink tights with petals on his head raises the beginnings of a giggle in even the most broadminded spectator, the giggle is soon quelled. In this case, Igor Kolb's huge, virile jump saw to that.

Spectre is a duet set to a waltz by Weber. A girl returns from her first ball with a rose presented by her beau, and, falling asleep, dreams she is visited by the spirit of the rose - that man in petals. So easy to mock. So hard to get high-romanticism right. But superb technique and rock-solid conviction carry the Kirov through. Kolb's physical presence, that leap, and some extraordinary voluptuous arm movements create an impression that one can well believe might make spectators swoon - as Nijinsky is reputed to have done.

The raunchier elements of the Fokine repertory were saved till last: a barn-storming Polovtsian Dances, and a Scheherazade so very feral and sinuous that one began to regard the occupants of the crested grand-tier box in a different light. Did HM know it was going to get this steamy?

The announcement that Valery Gergiev, the Kirov's artistic director and conductor-in-chief, had flown in specially to conduct the Rimsky-Korsakov score upped the stakes. Sure enough, the orchestra surpassed itself, and the dancers performed as if this were their last night on earth. Sultans glowered, odalisques gyrated, male slaves rutted, and the central couple coupled with the kind of outrageous restraint that serves only to eke out the pleasure. When Altynai Asylmuratova finally stood among the massacred slaves before the cuckolded Sultan, dagger in hand, the steely tension between him, her and the wall of sound rising up from the brass section was a thing I will not forget. Magnificent.

The Kirov stars looklike beings from another, superior universe. And it's nothing to do with costumes and lights. Take them away and the grandeur remains. Witness the public masterclass put on to raise money for Sterling Work, a charity that helps poor Russian children. Irek Mukhamedov translated, Angela Rippon compÿred (and flirted with Irek), and four painfully timid British ballet students showed by omission what it takes to dance the Nutcracker pas de deux.

Then a bunch of Kirov principals came on, in grungy dance mufti, and dazzled their way through a string of Petipa duets and assorted solos. Never mind the clattery rehearsal piano. Never mind the sports vests and rumpled shorts. For a few blinding moments they made you believe in classical dance as the only true expression of nobility, desire, heroism, joy. And even a dying swan.