The Bolshoi Ballet perform Yuri Grigorovich's version of the ballet by Adolphe Adam. Svetlana Lunkina plays the title role with Dmitry Gudanov as Count Albrecht and Maria Allash as the Queen of the Wilis. When young peasant girl Giselle discovers that her lover, Albrecht, is actually a nobleman in disguise who is due to be married, she dies from despair. But when Albrecht's life is threatened by the evil Wilis clan, Giselle's spirit returns to save him. Pavel Klinichev conducts the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra.

These highly entertaining memoirs of Marius Petipa, the great Franco-Russian choreogapher had never before been translated into English before their first publication in 1958. As virtual dictator of the Russian ballet in the second half of the 19th century, Petipa moulded its course for many years and may have been said to have created the style of classical dancing still known as Russian. His renown is undisputed, and his work lives not only in the pages of dance history but in the ballet repertoire of most Companies today. Petipa's memoirs reveal many inter-esting details of his career and of the people he worked with, including Tchaikovsky and the young Pavlova, and give an insight into his character and genius that it is not possible to gain from any other source. Written towards the end of his long life, in a mood of disillusion, when his work was neglected and in decline, he would have been delighted to know that his great ballets such as Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and La Bayadere are more popular today than ever before.