Mukhamedov's audition at the Bolshoi -- 1970

And so to the final and most crucial test: an assessment of his musicality and his basic potential to be a dancer.

Yet again, ten o'clock in the foyer and another hour's wait, then follow the clipboard up two flights of stairs and change into trunks and singlet with nine young colleagues. Out of the changing-room, along the passage and back into the brightly lit ballet studio to face Golovkina. This time the boys all knew their fates would be sealed before they bowed farewell to her.

Golovkina's secretary asked each one what they would dance, and which piece of music they would require the pianist to play. Irek had prepared a solo, 'Chapaevtsi', to a traditional tune and confidently told the secretary so. He could scarcely believe his ears when he was informed that the pianist could not play it. 'Can you manage without music?' he was asked. 'No,' he mumbled in reply. 'Then you will have to dance to one of the tunes we are going to play,' they said.

Irek sat and waited his turn in a sweat of fear. He knew he could do 'Chapaevtsi', and do it well; everyone had told him so. He had never improvised, certainly not in public, since his five-year-old capers in hospital. What would he do? What would happen when they called his name?

One by one the boys were called to the piano to clap, run and jump in time to different rhythms, then to dance their solos. Luckily for Irek, they nearly all chose to dance to the same piece of music, a folk tune adapted by the composer Gliere from his ballet Red Poppy, called 'Yablochko, the sailor's dance.

Now it came to Irek, still in a state of shock. For him keeping time to changing rhythms was instinctive, achieved through feeling, not thought. The solo, though, was another matter. The music started, so he had to do something. The panic-stricken boy somehow managed to string together the steps he had watched the other boys do, improvising sequences he had desperately memorised as he waited his turn.

He sat down white and shaking. His first and most crucial audition, he felt, had been a fiasco. Rasheda, when he finally made it back downstairs to tell her the news, agreed. What a disaster!

They hardly considered it worth returning the next day to study the list of successful entrants, but they did. Which was just as well, because Irek Mukhamedov had won one of the eighty places on offer and was therefore accepted as a pupil of the Moscow Ballet School and would start his studies in September.

Anatoly Yelagin, Irek's first teacher at the school, was a member of the auditioning commission, and picked him out almost at once. 'He was a little boy, not very tall. When he came into the audition, he sat quietly on the chair and almost against my will I found myself looking at him. He made a very clear visual impression on me. He was a quiet and very balanced little boy.

'It's not possible to say that he had very good feet, and his build was slightly stocky, but when we asked him to dance something, they played the music and he improvised, and he danced so well that we said, "Yes, he must study with us."'

Irek Mukhamedov by Jeffery Taylor. 1994. Pages 16-17.