Search - Tchaikovsky :: Tchaikovsky: Ballet Music [Box Set]

So-So Performances at Budget Price

J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 04/24/2009

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Much as I hate to say this, most of the performances here -- seven CDs containing Tchaikovsky's complete ballet music for 'Sleeping Beauty', 'Swan Lake', 'The Nutcracker', plus Glazunov's orchestration of Chopin piano music fashioned into a ballet called 'Les Sylphides' -- are mediocre. There are some bright spots, as in the Glazunov and 'Swan Lake' (2 1/2 out of the total of 7 CDs), but one has the feeling that most of the works were under-rehearsed and under-characterized by mostly second-tier orchestras and by conductors who seem to have had little ballet experience. Added to that is the fact that some of the recordings are about twenty years old -- Nutcracker and Sylphides, 1989; Sleeping Beauty, 1991 -- and in dated sound; the only reasonably current-sounding recording is of Dmitry Yablonsky leading the Russian State Orchestra in Swan Lake, 2001.



The only possible recommendation I can make is for the person with limited funds who wants to collect Tchaikovsky's ballet scores. There are, however, recordings of the complete scores (as opposed to suites excerpted from the complete scores) that surpass these and some of them are even at pretty reasonable prices. For instance, Swan Lake done by the Philadelphia Orchestra Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake (complete ballet); Wolfgang Sawallisch; Philadelphia Orchestra, Sleeping Beauty led by Gergiev Tchaikovsky: The Sleeping Beauty; Nutcracker, also by Gergiev Pytor Illych Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker - Complete Ballet.



Scott Morrison"