If you’re going to go big with a ballet, what better choice than Swan Lake? Not only is the 19th-century treasure already grand, with its gorgeously histrionic Tchaikovsky score and its large corps of women in featherdown white, but it’s also the one ballet nearly everyone knows something about. Ask a friend new to the idiom what they’d like to see, and if they don’t say “Nothing,” they’ll probably say “Swan Lake.” Derek Deane’s 1997 in-the-round version swims in swans. In any other space, three dozen would be too much; at Royal Albert Hall, the count rises to 60. By virtue of its scale and circular stage, this English National Ballet production proves less the good-girl-bad-girl fairy tale of a natural-born princess, her faithless steward, and her evil double, than an ingenious feat of engineering that transcends its design. By means of human bodies in geometric communion, the ballet reaches the sublime. —Apollinaire Scherr