A wondrous night unfolded at the Opera House as the S.F. Ballet’s swans floated in gracefully and flew off to the cheers of a sold-out house.

For many, “Swan Lake” is the pinnacle of all ballet love-drama fantasies, a fairy tale that grips the heart with great endearment. This time led by a very promising ballerina out of Sweden, Nikisha Fogo.

The fairy-tale plot: innocent maidens are scooped up by the evil winged sorcerer Von Rothbart, transformed magically into swans, and subservient into all eternity. Subplot is a fickle human swain of lesser IQ, Prince Siegfried, falling in love with her, and later falling for the bot—-Rothbart’s seductive look-alike Black Swan, the super-athlete, which leads to the demise of one and all, and to wet hankies throughout the house.

“Well, yeah,” said the wise one. “But actually I read it as allegory, Rothbart being the bully major power swallowing up the less powerful defenseless neighbor in a quick war, like a shark after minnows.” Hmmmm….

Fairy tale or Weltpolitik, even after a century and a half, the “Swan Lake” experience conquers hearts and souls around the world while offering the dream role for all aspiring ballerinas.

The opening night’s wronged heroine Odette/Odile was Fogo. Initially a habile technician in that tremulous first meeting with the prince, Ms. Fogo became an ever more poetic presence with him in that nonpareil act two, all white with those swan feathers embracing her hair.

The Black Swan role suited her even better, calling on her playing the deceitful one reverberantly, combined with the requisite endurance to make 32 whipping fouettée spins in her solo variation, one of the greatest physical challenges in all ballet. These she spun off brilliantly to the exuberant house Feb. 23, without the creeping toward the footlights that fatigue often imposes.

If Fogo is not yet the ultimate swan queen, she is well en route, beloved by the admiring throng.

Her Prince was Aaron Robison, a powerful partner with soaring jetée leaps and the knack for throwing her effortlessly toward the skies. Heightening the drama are her two prescribed backward falls, each time caught adroitly by the prince.

In his best role ever, corps member Nathaniel Remez flew about the stage like a black crow from first to last, nearly earning audience boos for his malevolent Rothbart role.

Not to be forgotten was the parade of snow-white enchanted swans in perfect alignment, sometimes 16, sometimes up to 30—what enkindles the audience all night long. And of course the quartet of fast-stepping cygnets in their rapid-fire show-stopper—a deft contrasting segment by composer Tchaikovsky.

Apart from the brass section, Martin West’s orchestra was unassailable.

Helgi Tomasson’s lavish, large-cast 2009 production with its projections has held up well, adding the overture’s scenelet of Rothbart capturing a beauty on the fly and transforming her into a captive swan. Given that, a printed synopsis is superfluous.

Augmenting the many no-plot variations was Esteban Hernandez, who, despite his unusual leftward turns, partnered two ladies with panache as Benno, halting the usual act-one yawns.

BALLET NOTES—The four Odette/Odile dancers this week are Wona Park, Sasha de Sola, Frances Chung and Fogo, stemming from four different countries…In some productions, the double role is split between two dancers, as occurred with ballet great Natalia Makarova doing Odette only in the Soviet Kirov ballet tour here in the 1960s….In the USSR, the denouement of “Swan Lake” was revised to produce a happy ending.

Forgotten in all the hoopla was that the SFB—then a minor opera-ballet company— had given the US premiere of the spectacle in 1940 under Willem Christensen, 45 years after the Petipa-Ivanov world premiere in Russia. Until 1940 US audiences got a taste of the banquet with the touring Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo doing Act Two only, paired with “Scheherazade,” in sleek one-nighters. Their legendary ballerina Tamara Karsavina demonstrated the salient steps to the Christensen brothers here while on the tour, and the rest was history.

Any thought that olden ballerinas could not emote was dispelled by the late choreographer John Cranko, who told me once emphatically about Karsavina’s acting: “Oh, could she ever!!” Her father Platon Karsavin had been a favorite ballet pupil of Marius Petipa himself.

TOMASSON’S 2009 “SWAN LAKE” at S.F. Ballet Feb. 23-March 3. War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. For SFB info: (415) 865-2000 or online, www.sfballet.org.

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