But if Sarah Wildor’s account on the opening night is any measure of the rest, then the Royal Ballet should be greeting 1999 with its head held high.
Nothing is perfect, of course. Not one of the ballerinas billed to dance the demanding title role has danced it before. Sir Fred’s reworking of an old French ballet has been a favourite for nearly 40 years, and balletomane memories being of the elephant variety, there’s a lot to live up to. And at the end of a year beset with gloom for the Royal Ballet, presenting Ashton’s most popular number at the South Bank has taken no small measure of courage. The rest is pure pleasure, and pure Englishness, in what is surely the happiest work in the entire canon of classical dance.

But wrapping an anglophone tongue around the title is the only difficulty to be met with in this three-act story ballet. `Pirates of Penzance’: Queen’s Theatre, W1 (0171 494 5040), to 9 January.. In 1803 they called it “Filly me Gardy”. Now British ballet lovers refer to it by one coded syllable: “Fee”. Certainly nothing with the audacity to call itself a professional production and charge West End prices. If this is the best D’Oyly Carte can do, it would be better for all concerned if the company accepted the inevitable and quietly died. As things are now, it’s just a sad, incompetent purveyor of misplaced nostalgia.`The Golden Cockerel’: Sadler’s Wells, EC1 (0171 863 8000), to 16 January.

In two decades of sitting through dispiriting performances of Gilbert & Sullivan, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so feeble, so pathetic, so embarrasingly bad. The Russian- Greek soprano Elena Kelessidi was ailing on the first night but still charming (in the tightly focused, elegant way of her recent Royal Opera Violettas) as the temptress Queen of Shemakha. And that bizarre haute- contre tenor Jean-Paul Fouchecourt (star of Covent Garden’s Platee) finds a good home for his specialist skills in the dog-pitch role of the astrologer – set so high because Pushkin passingly describes the character as a eunuch.As a footnote I should add that however disappointing the Cockerel might be, it shines brightly by comparison with the new (if you can call it that) D’Oyly Carte Pirates of Penzance. There are two casts, alternating, and Cast A is mostly from Russia (or associated territories), led by Paata Burchuladze, who gives as full and rounded an account of the Tsar as the piece or the production permit. But so much of Rimsky’s score is also music of enchantment, ravishing and seductive None of that gets any visual return here.

Turning the cockerel into a symbol of proletarian revolution is fair game, as is the grandiloquent May Day parade of Soviet achievements that Hopkins interpolates into a big finale: so much of Rimsky’s score is parody music, it invites that sort of cartoon gesture. And Rimsky’s response was accordingly a cocktail of fairy magic and absurdist satire: an extension of the literary tone of voice in Gogol, and the precedent for a whole subculture of Russian opera of which Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges and Shostakovich’s The Nose are prime examples.The problem with this Tim Hopkins show, though, is that it runs with the satire and dumps the magic. Rimsky’s interest in the story was undoubtedly prompted by the real-life military incompetence of Nicholas II in the then-recent Russo-Japanese war. The result is disaster, humiliation, and ultimately death, when the cockerel pecks the Tsar on the head. A lazy, stupid Tsar, unable to protect his country from its enemies, is persuaded by his astrologer to rely on the services of a golden cockerel (ie, a weather-vane) to tell him what to do. And in the soulless box which is the auditorium of the new but not especially exciting Sadler’s Wells, it isn’t helped by thin designs (Anthony Baker) and a production concept that only delivers half the piece.
Like most Rimsky-Korsakov operas, The Golden Cockerel is a fairy fantasy which manages to present itself as something steeped in Russian folk- consciousness, even though its provenance (via Pushkin) is a Washington Irving story set in Moorish Spain.