Anna Karenina still leads Mariinsky Ballet's tour

True to form the Mariinsky Ballet has already made programme changes for its Covent Garden visit next summer, not a fortnight after announcing its tour on 3 December. But we're used to it and it's all to the good. Substituting Don Quixote for the Lavrovsky Romeo and Juliet originally planned means a more traditional cast to the tour, a much more sure-fire box office, and a direct comparison between the St Petersburg virtuosos and their Moscow rivals at the Bolshoi who for the past two years have made Don Q their party piece.

Between 25 July and 13 August 2011 the hallowed St Petersburg company’s repertoire features only one novelty, the British premiere of the gifted Alexei Ratmansky’s Anna Karenina, to the Tolstoy novel, which will be a double bill with Carmen, the Alberto Alonso version created originally for Maya Plisetskaya and his sister Alicia Alonso simultaneously, in Moscow and Havana. The music for both is by Rodion Shchedrin, the modern Russian composer currently being specially championed by Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky’s director and conductor.

However almost as intriguing for balletomanes is the all-American bill of Balanchine and Jerome Robbins: Balanchine's Scotch Symphony (to Mendelssohn’s music) and Ballet Imperial (to Tchaikovsky), and Robbins’s dark-mooded In the Night (a dance to Chopin Nocturnes). Other programmes will be:

• a "Homage to Fokine": with the Russian version of Les Sylphides, called Chopiniana, The Firebird and Sheherazade, deploying the Mariinsky orchestra in two major scores by Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.
• Instead of the originally scheduled Romeo and Juliet, the crowd-pleasing bravura romp Don Quixote has been substituted
• two time-honoured classics of Mariinsky style: Swan Lake and La Bayadère.

Among the top artists heading the tour are the usually jetsetting Diana Vishnëva (pictured right with Igor Kolb in Swan Lake) and Igor Zelensky, and the scheduled presence of the peerless classicist Ulyana Lopatkina and rising maverick Alina Somova ensure a lively debate about the way Mariinsky classical style is going. US guest artist David Hallberg should also offer a contrasting view onto American classical style, while the young British dancer Xander Parish who left the Royal Ballet last year to join the Mariinsky is also promised.

Other dancers listed include familiar young stars from the last tour, the tall redhead Ekaterina Kondaurova, the lyrical Viktoria Terëshkina, the outstanding new man Vladimir Shklyarov and petite dazzler Olesia Novikova.

It will be the 50th anniversary of the London impresario Victor Hochhauser's first presentation of the then Kirov Ballet - the June 1961 tour on which Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West just days before.

Public booking opens on 5 April 2011.