The Times remembered her first appearance with the young Nureyev:

Yvette Chauviré was one of the most dazzling and gracious dancers of the 20th century and the finest French ballerina of her generation. Rudolf Nureyev, unable to leave Leningrad, yearned to appear with her in Giselle. After his defection the French government refused to allow them to perform the work for fear of upsetting the Russians. Thus it was London audiences who, in 1962, first saw them together.

Where Galina Ulanova had brought to Giselle an air of peasant tragedy and Alicia Markova a sense of fragile romanticism, Chauviré offered a more refined calculation. “Her acting, balanced and thoughtful, hardly permitted a gesture out of place,” wrote a Times critic of that appearance, adding that in the second act “with her remote pallor and impassive dedication, she was like love carved in alabaster”.