Apollo, protector of classic dignity in art, is surely the presiding deity for the Mariinsky Ballet. Balanchine's Apollo, made for Diaghilev in 1928, is honoured as the work in which the choreographer, understanding the clarities of Stravinsky's score, saw his way to a balletic manner as formally pure as the music. Thus Apollo, in most western performance, seems a rite reasserting certain stylistic assumptions, notably those of Balanchine's New York City Ballet.

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What a revelation, then, in the current Mariinsky Ballet season, with its orchestra under Valery Gergiev, to see it reconsidered, in a reading expansive, richly sonorous. Suddenly Apollo became a drama, urgently re-enacted and heart stopping. It acquired, within the spaciousness of Gergiev's account, room to speak largely, to disclose its narrative secrets - and it is a narrative of real significance as the young god discovers his identity as leader of the Muses. I have never before been so astonished by its power as myth, nor so fascinated by the dancers' impersonations of these divinities. Played as humans rather than symbols, the roles regained a vitality that I believe they had in Diaghilev's staging (something I owe to a demonstration by Serge Lifar, for whom the ballet was made in 1928).

Igor Zelensky proposes the lustrous physique, the presence, the sophistication and beauties of Lifar's plastique, which the ballet first displayed, and he is superlatively good. Amplitude of dynamics, eloquence of gesture, the innocent grandeur the role demands - all are his. His Muses (Ekaterina Osmolkina as Terpsichore, Nadezhda Gonchar as Calliope, Olesya Novikova as Polyhymnia) are radiantly in command of their choreography, understanding the implicit nobility and the sometimes lightness of their dances, finding the drama that permeates their movement (young divinities seeking to please a young god) as do few of the ice-maiden interpreters elsewhere. In all my years watching Apollo, I have never been so grateful for a performance.

The rest of the evening brought Balanchine's Prodigal Son (Prokofiev ablaze with Gergiev's temperament) in a fine account by Mikhail Lobukin, with Ekaterina Kondaurova showing yet again, as the Siren, that she is a wonderful and expressive artist. Balanchine's Tchaikovsky pas de deux was deliciously done by Novikova and the impeccable Vladimir Shklyarov (a blue-blood of the dance), and Kondaurova was, unsurprisingly, amazing in clarity in the Middle Duet by Alexey Ratmansky. It was, in every way, Apollo's evening: the Mariinsky knows its especial deity well.