Taken in the spirit of a retrospective, an evening devoted to four William Forsythe ballets is not as unusual as it sounds, even for the Kirov. Some love his work, others loathe it. My own feeling about this controversial choreographer is, to borrow one of his ballet's titles, in the middle, somewhat elevated.

Forsythe took classical ballet and shoved it into a new phase but he has not renounced its basic tenets. He has just made it over into his sometimes savage, modern idea of what ballet should be. That, at least, is the impression he gives in his early works. Nothing in the Kirov's all-Forsythe programme is from later than 1997; all the works are from his period as artistic director of Frankfurt Ballet and predate his interest in more political themes and in using big, complicated sets. It is as if the company is stepping tentatively into this, for them, new world or, perhaps, Forsythe's more recent works were not available.