In time for the holidays (um, which holiday again, Bill-O?): Buy John Lanchbery's splendid recordings of all three Tchaikovsky ballets for a mere $20!

Leopold Stokowski conducts the "Dance of the Sugar-Plum
Fairy" in Walt Disney's Fantasia

by Ken

I've spent a lot of time listening to recordings and trying to puzzle out musical and technical enigmas that arise. I don't know that my "explanations" are much good, but what really throws me is when I can't come up with a reasonable explanation. I encountered such a case recently when I first became aware of a 2004 EMI France CD reissue of John Lanchbery's 1981 recordings of all three complete ballets by Tchaikovsky.

It seemed like an eminently logical idea: having Lanchbery (1823-2003), an internationally renowned ballet composer, arranger, and conductor, record this music in London in state-of-the-art digital sound with the excellent Philharmonia Orchestra. Lanchbery, after all, had impeccable credentials as a dance conductor, and therefore wouldn't commit the gross improprieties the Ballet Bullies always attribute to non-dance conductors who perform music composed for the dance.

The only thing was that when the recordings were released on LP, they didn't seem terribly special. Alongside the numerous outstanding recordings that had been made of all three ballets, they seemed rather pallid.

Over the years I returned to those LPs periodically, to see if I might get some message I'd previously missed, without success. But the other day I noticed the aforementioned French EMI CD issue, which squeezed the pieces onto five budget-priced discs. The set I saw was priced at $20 (and you can find it for that price online) -- for all three full-length ballets. My curiosity was reignited., even though I had previously bought EMI's CD compilation of Andre Previn's beautiful recordings of the three Tchaikovsky ballets with the London Symphony and found the sound quality distinctly disappointing -- and these are recordings I know to be musically and sonically top-notch.

I won't bore you with the paltry theories I've come up with to explain the discrepancy. Instead, let me just report, with delight, that as I hear them now the Lanchbery performances are a consistent joy -- full-bodied, rhythmically driving, passionate, songful, and gorgeously played and recorded. The scrunching onto five very well-filled isn't painless. A mere 8 1/2 minutes of The Nutcracker spills onto the second CD (though on the plus side, that puts "The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" [ye gods in heaven, is there really such a thing as Sugar-Plum Fairy Barbie?] at the start of the disc), and less than 5 minutes of the start of Act II of Sleeping Beauty is tacked onto a previous disc.

I should also say that I haven't sat down with scores to verify that, say, no repeats have been trimmed to squeeze the music on. Ironically, given the quality of the performances and recording, and the low per-disc cost (you can find the set online for $20), it would have been just as fine a bargain spread out over the more usual six CDs, but that may be just too persnickety. While we're being persnickety, English-speaking buyers need to know that the contents listing and liner note are all in French.

Does Tchaikovsky need defending?

As to the music itself, I hope at this date it doesn't need selling. There used to be Tchaikovsky snobs who sneered at those of us who adore his music, but my impression is that they've mostly gone on to other hobbies.

Poor Tchaikovsky's reputation among some "serious" critics has always suffered because of the sheer irresistibleness of so much of his music. It seems to pump directly into the bloodstream.

The composer himself may have had a touch of this same feeling. He had a low opinion of The Nutcracker, at least as compared with the short opera, Yolanta, which he composed to share a double bill with the littlest of his three ballets. (He was positively withering on the subject of the little Nutcracker Suite he extracted from the full ballet, which is probably still his most-performed work. The difference is that now there are a large number of other, more substantial Tchaikovsky works that are performed an awful lot.)

Yolanta is indeed a lovely work, of remarkably delicate sensibilities. It tells the story of a king who tries to protect (as he sees it) his daughter, the princess Yolanta, from suffering the pain of being blind by using all his royal powers to prevent her from ever knowing that she's blind. Of course it's a wonderful metaphor for parents' regrettable impulse to "protect" their children from realities it's ultimately dangerous and destructive to shield them from. But it's also a remarkable attempt to imagine a world where there is nothing to see and nothing seen -- and obviously music, placing such a premium on sound and hearing, is an ideal medium through which to try to imagine such a world. Yolanta might be deeply moving if the damned thing could be really well performed, but that's something I don't expect ever to see. (Records aren't a bad way to experience it, but even from a musical standpoint it's an excruciatingly difficult piece to bring to life.)

Whereas The Nutcracker is, for goodness' sake, one of the most astonishing creations to spring from the mind of humankind. Not even its involuntary servitude as a ritual Christmas torture for the kiddies can dim the brilliance of its imagined world of toy drama. In a competent performance, the inexorable build to the soaring climax of Act I is one of the supreme spans of musical construction -- and Lanchbery brings it off as well as anybody I've heard (with the optional choral part, if you're keeping score).

Oh, that's the "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy"?

At the top of this piece we have a clip of the chunk of Walt Disney's Fantasia in which Leopold Stokowski conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in the oh-so-familiar "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" from The Nutcracker -- the kind of all-sense-stimulating music that set Stoky's imagination roaring. (From this excerpt in particular it's hard to believe that the original Fantasia recordings will be 70 years old in April!) We know that the piece was inspired by Tchaikovsky's curiosity as to what use could be made of the intriguing celesta, a keyboard instrument that produces this distinctive chimelike sound. We know too that nobody has ever found a more arresting, not to mention tingling, application.

I'm sorry I can't offer you Lanchbery's performance, which holds its own against Stoky's. For that matter I would have liked to offer you, at minimum, say, the Sleeping Beauty Act I finale, which Lanchbery builds wonderfully. Alas, I'm still working on my (basically nonexistent) computer audio and video technical skills. One of these days perhaps . . .

It was Howie who pointed out to me the seasonal coincidence that I happened to decide to write about the Tchaikovsky ballets during the holiday season, the very time when kiddies the world over are being force-marched into renderings of The Nutcracker, with the apparent intent of engender a life-long hatred of serious music. You have only my word that the timing is a coincidence; I listen to the Tchaikovsky ballets year-round.

But if this is a good time of year for you to think about this music, that works for me.

Why listen to the ballets complete?

Sometimes I listen to the Tchaikovsky ballets in suite form, but more often I prefer to hear them in full -- or at least a full act at a time. It's partly a matter of the sustained musical invention, which goes far beyond what you might guess from listening to collections of musical "highlights." But there's more to it. The complete scores aren't conceived in terms of highlights and lowlights. This composer's imagination had a specifically dramatic cast that comes to the fore in his theater works, the operas and ballets, animating the best of them in a way that you can't imagine from just excerpts, memorable as they are.

It occurs to me that we tend to think the Tchaikovsky ballets represent a genre, that of the "full-length ballet." However, the reality is that, except for Tchaikovsky's later countryman Sergei Prokofiev with his Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, nobody else has pulled off the feat of sustaining musical interest through the length of a full-evening ballet score. I guess you could make a case of sorts for Leo Delibes, but really now, how often would anybody really wish to sit through the whole of Coppelia or Sylvia?

Tchaikovsky, as noted, made his own little Nutcracker Suite, and Prokofiev extracted no fewer than three orchestral suites from his Romeo and Juliet. In addition, countless other hands have assembled suites from all of these great ballets -- and any conductor can make his/her own, by stringing together as much or as little music as he/she sees fit. Certainly, there have been many performances of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev ballet suites I've treasured, notably from conductors we have no opportunity to hear perform the complete scores, people like Yevgeny Mravinsky, Pierre Monteux, even Herbert von Karajan (a better Tchaikovsky conductor than a lot of people seem to remember).

Then there's the curious case of Eugene Ormandy, Stoky's successor in Philadelphia, who during his long tenure as music director gave glorious performances of (usually) his own suites from the Tchaikovsky ballets. The single LP's worth of each that he recorded for Columbia Masterworks ranks with the great Tchaikovsky on records. Surely, if he had wished, when it came to redoing their recorded repertory for RCA Red Seal, Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra could have done the ballets complete; it's my understanding that RCA would have been only too happy to have more repertory Ormandy and the Philadelphians hadn't already recorded. I have to assume the conductor just wasn't interested in doing so. For RCA he once again did a single LP's worth of selections from each of the ballets.

No knock on Tchaikovsky's little Nutcracker Suite -- it gathers 20 or so minutes' worth of ever-delightful music. But as an experiment, try listening to the Suite and then to just Act I of the complete Nutcracker, which lasts about 45 minutes. First off, I think you'll be astonished at how much wonderful music you lose in the Suite. And then, even if you don't know the story, especially as you get to know the music well, I think you'll find yourself overwhelmed by the dramatic build-up of the complete Act I.

You don't have to be a "dance person" -- I'm sure not!

I should stress that I'm not speaking here of the music's appeal for ballet fans. I'm not much of a dance person myself. On those rare occasions when I'm dragged to the ballet, generally on the promise of hearing some music I love played by musicians who supposedly understand its dance qualities, I usually come away (a) fuming at the miserable quality of the musical presentation, and (b) churlishly ungrateful for the tedious visual "spectacle," which, rather than adding anything to the music, merely distracts or actually detracts from it. In the same way that I rarely enjoy actual stagings of Stravinsky's trio of ballet masterpieces The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring (I much prefer to let them take shape in the theater of my imagination), I listen to Tchaikovsky's ballets for their all but unimaginable sustained inspiration.

Composer-arranger-conductor John Lanchbery

Now, I'm not about to chuck a shelfful of other recordings of these timeless masterpieces -- or rather shelves full, allowing for various recorded media. But I can say that I would be unable to direct you to a better version of any of them. I find this almost as remarkable as the quality of the music itself.

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