Peter Martins’s “Swan Lake” which began a 12-performance run at New York City Ballet on Friday night, operates under what is now the New York imperative in ballet and opera performance: Evenings are to be as short as possible. Twenty-five years ago, American Ballet Theatre’s “Swan Lake” had three intermissions; Mr. Martins’s version has one. Happily, though, when NYCB introduced its full-length “Swan Lake” in 1999, the urge to streamline did not mandate the brutal cuts that afflict the company’s staging of “Sleeping Beauty.” Mr. Martins, in fact, allowed himself the time to provide more divertissements in the ballroom scene than in most productions.

Mr. Martins’s production has grown on me since its NYCB premiere, though I don’t expect it to conform to the Euro-Russian taproots of the ballet. The opera-house ballet troupes of Europe and Russia have enormous performing rosters that allow roles like Prince Siegfried’s mother to be performed by dancers old enough to be parents of young adults; the interpreters of these roles have received extensive training in mime and in the body language of aristocratic etiquette. NYCB is half the size of the European companies and can’t support dancers who concentrate on acting or mime roles. The first-act ensemble of courtiers, however, is so stripped down that I wonder if it was meant to be symbolic. No matter how abstract or contrarian Mr. Martins’s production declares itself, baronial manners are in the grain of the ballet and are welcome whenever they appear.

Sebastien Marcovici, who made his debut as Prince Siegfried on Saturday afternoon, supplied the element of European noble culture that is largely missing from the production as a whole. Mr. Marcovici received most of his training in France.His gestures are gentle and gracious. He is impressionable in the white act and downright passive in the black act, which moves the story along wonderfully and makes him a believable lover and wouldbe savior for Odette, as well as a likely patsy for the machinations of the wizard Von Rothbart and his accomplice Odile.

Mr. Marcovici certainly is not a classical virtuoso, but he has upgraded his technique from what he’s demonstrated in the past so that it was respectable at all times. And in the solo to the Act II overture, he danced quite eloquently.

Mr. Marcovici’s Odette/Odile was Jenifer Ringer, a first-rate talent who joined the company in 1990 and has had a somewhat checkered career since then (for a couple of years she left ballet altogether). Ms. Ringer is not in perfect shape at the moment, and some of her transitions aren’t as suave and clean as they should be. But her technique is sound, she is a glamorous presence onstage, and she gave herself to the dual role, showing a new majesty.

On Friday night, the leads were danced by Wendy Whelan and Damian Woetzel. Mr. Woetzel was less dynamic technically than he’s been in the past, but certainly retained a good deal of his old alacrity. It is a stretch for him to evince nobility, but he was believably impassioned and vulnerable.

As Odette/Odile, Ms. Whelan was not nearly as much in her element as she had been earlier in the week, when she danced sublimely in “Symphony in C” and Christopher Wheeldon’s “Liturgy.” There is an angularity to her, a graphic muscular definition to her long limbs that suits a neo-classic or modern ballet but is a bit jarring in “Swan Lake.” Yet she approached Friday’s performance with such intelligence that she commanded admiration throughout.

The core of the production is George Balanchine’s staging of the white act for NYCB in 1951, which was revised considerably from what we recognize as the standard 1895 Lev Ivanov text and which Balanchine continued to tweak over the next 30 years. Mr. Martins has made his own alterations to this act as well, but the white swan adagio is as close to the Ivanov original as anything in the production (although it attaches the upbeat oompah musical ending that was eliminated when Riccardo Drigo revised Tchaikovsky’s score for the St. Petersburg premiere).

Both of this weekend’s lead couples were aware the adagio they were dancing required a different approach than their customary repertories demand. Ms. Whelan worked assiduously to ensure that her spareness of line did not result in dryness, while Ms. Ringer’s softer contour provided lushness. Their developpes were beautiful and not abrupt, and they maintained a classical alignment and aplomb. In the black act, both Ms. Ringer’s and Ms. Whelan’s Odiles were highclass seductresses.

Missing in the silhouettes of both ballerinas, however, is the arched Russian back that has indelibly imprinted itself on the role. It’s possible to look at the straighter and stiffer NYCB back as simply more evidence of a different training and style, but the Russian back is missed because it contributes to the imagery of this ballet. It integrates the ballerina’s entire body into an organic curve that makes her both regal and subsumed into the water world from which she emerges.

I particularly like the way Mr.Martins ends his production. There is neither the traditional love-in-death transfiguration arising from the mutual suicide of Odette and Siegfried nor the absurdly conventional happy ending of Soviet revisions. In Mr. Martins’s production, Rothbart is defeated but Siegfried’s betrayal of Odette with Odile means Odette is not released from her spell. The lovers are not to be reunited in life or in death.

Mr. Martins’s Odette hears the transfiguration motif sounded by the harp and realizes that she must return irrevocably to her vale of tears. Tremulously she retreats, bourreeing backward offstage. Siegfried tries to follow, but her flock of swans blocks his passage. The lovers are parted forever.

City Ballet’s winter season runs until February 26 at the New York State Theater (Lincoln Center, 212-870-5570).