Essential watching for anyone who loves dance are five Video Artists International releases new to DVD featuring performances by members of the Bolshoi Ballet as well as some of its greatest stars.

Like its St. Petersburg rival, the Kirov ballet, the traditions of Moscow’s Bolshoi company date back to the 18th century. There has never been excessive admiration lost between the two companies: The Kirov traditionally thought the Bolshoi was crude; the Bolshoi considered the Kirov staid to the point of inertness. Certainly both companies reflect the temperament of their very different cities. Like Moscow, the Bolshoi preserves the vigor of this ancient capital of Russia, whereas the Kirov has traditionally exemplified the Euro-centric essence of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as a conscious act of homage to European urban centers.

After the 1917 Revolution, the Soviets moved the capital of Russia back to Moscow from St. Petersburg, and the Bolshoi’s proximity to the Kremlin meant that during the Soviet epoch the Bolshoi always received greater government attention and support. The Bolshoi made its Western debut in1956, five years before the Kirov was seen here. And the Bolshoi had no compunction about poaching dancers away from its Leningrad revival.

Galina Ulanova, who had quickly become one of the Kirov’s leading ballerinas after entering the company in 1928, was transferred to the Bolshoi in 1944. Her fabled “Giselle” is the highpoint of 1956’s “The Bolshoi Ballet,” a studio film made by Austrian director Paul Czinner in Britain shortly after the Bolshoi’s sensational debut season there.

Ulanova’s performance in this role remains unsurpassed: There is nothing pious about it. She’s not in awe of the role and its great tradition; she was herself part of its great tradition and certainly by this point realized how much she had contributed to the ballet’s enduring existence.

She offers a highly individual Giselle: notes of eccentricity and whimsy in her characterization never violate the essential innocence and selflessness of Giselle herself. At 46, she remained in possession of most of her dance faculties and when she wasn’t, Czinner was there to help; there is a crudely executed cutaway in her Act II solo adagio, made so that we don’t see what was obviously a troublesome moment for her. This “Giselle” is abridged and presented as an act of Ulanova-adoration, although Ulanova’s colleagues are also given some chances to show their excellence. Unfortunately, the DVD simply transfers a notvery-pristine print; we must await a full restoration of this definitive performance.

Czinner’s “The Bolshoi Ballet,” also includes a number of excerpts from the Bolshoi’s touring repertory, among them Leonid Lavrovsky’s “Walpurgisnacht,” performed to Gounod’s ballet from “Faust.” Classically, totalitarianism goes hand in hand with official prudery, which makes the Soviet approach to bacchanalia all the more interesting to see. Another great Bolshoi ballerina, Raisa Struchkova, is mistress of the revels here, nuzzling satyrs and being happily tossed up, down, and sideways from the arms of one ephebe to another in the manner of the Soviet acrobatic adagio.

Yuri Grigorovich, who was the Bolshoi’s artistic director between 1964 and 1995, was also originally a product of the Kirov, where he made his name as a choreographer with “The Stone Flower” in 1957. One of VAI’s new releases is a 1979 performance of “Stone Flower” at the Bolshoi, led by Bolshoi royal couple Ekaterina Maximova and Vladimir Vasiliev. It was filmed live on the vast stage there, and was probably spliced from the best of more than one performance.

Performed to Prokofiev’s final score, “The Stone Flower” is based on classic Russian folk tales concerning the stonecutter Danilo, who’s whisked away but eventually restored to his fiancée, Katerina, by the lizard-supple Mistress of the Copper Mountain, who takes him to her abode populated by minerals and jewels where she mistakenly believes he will be better able to concentrate on his art.

Mr. Vasiliev was avatar of a new generation of Bolshoi men in the 1960s, more lithe and less bottom heavy than their predecessors. Mr. Vasiliev combines a heroic technique, great partnering ability, and something of the poet and something of the Russian muzhik in his soul, as well. All of this makes him unbeatable as stonecutter Danilo.

Despite Ms. Maximova’s beautiful, lissome body, both the charm and the limitations of the soubrette/ingénue temperament have haunted her career. She’s perfectly cast as Katerina and doesn’t, at 40, make ingénue-ness seem overly contrived.

Also transmitted live from the Bolshoi stage is a 1978 performance of the warhorse “Don Quixote,” starring the husband-and-wife partnership of Nadezhda Pavlova and Vyacheslav Gordeyev. Ms. Pavlova had recently joined the company after training in the city of Perm, to which the Kirov troupe had been evacuated during World War II. Her performance as Kitri here supplies yet another cautionary lesson about the hazards of prematurely promoted performers.

The girlish Ms. Pavlova was expert at telegraphing to the audience an infectious “How much I love to dance” enthusiasm. This type of performance energy can easily turn into kitsch, and while it doesn’t here, a strain that perhaps helps to explain the vicissitudes of her later career is evident. Mr. Gordeyev is impeccably understated, and thankfully doesn’t tart up the role of Basilio with a lot of garish interpolations.

Also included on this release are selections from a 1964 “Don Quixote,” starring two more Bolshoi legends: Maya Plisetskaya and Marius Liepa. Ms. Plisetskaya is one of the ballet world’s freest spirits: She is audacious even by the standards of Bolshoi custom. And Kitri is the perfect expression of her mischievous, combustive spirit. In the classical dream sequence she takes liberties that would be unforgivable in another dancer, but she is truly a performer who can disarm criticism: Her freedoms become a paean to liberty itself. Like Mr. Vasiliev, Liepa was an outstanding representation of new possibilities for the male dancer during these years.

Two more DVDs feature chapters from Mr. Vasiliev’s own choreographic career, which began in the late 1960s. Created for Soviet television in 1982, Mr. Vasiliev’s “Anyuta,” based on a Chekhov short story, gives Ms. Maximova emotional scope in the role of a typically Chekhovian frustrated provincial wife. Vivid character sketches are also provided by Mr. Vasiliev in the role of her father, and to several distinguished Kirov dancers, John Markovsky, Anatoly Gridin, and Marat Daukayev, as some of the men in her life.

Another VAI release features Natalia Ryzhenko’s “Trapeze” set to an early Prokofiev score and starring Ms. Maximova and Mr. Vasiliev in a series of backstage at the circus vignettes. “Trapeze” is paired with Mr. Vasiliev’s “Fragments of a Biography,” a ballet in which his recollections unfold in a suite of pas de deux to tango music. Here we get to see Ms. Maximova in her maturity as well as veteran Nina Timofeyeva, another Kirov star transplanted to the Bolshoi, and Liepa’s son Andris, who was by the time this was filmed c. 1990 a rising Bolshoi star himself.