Peter Tchaikovsky, Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan ‎– Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty Suites

This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog.

Vinyl's Revenge digs out an old vinyl from my collection with a distinctive cover - it is faux-metallic, with a fkowery design in the front (see the picture below, which is pretty representative...)

As I stated in a blog post in June 2014, Herbert von Karajan, has left behind a good umber of "classical favourites" recorded more than once - with the Philharmonia Orchestra (in the 50's for EMI) and with the Berlin Philharmonic (over 4 decades on DGG). The post suggested a third orchestra - the Vienna Philharmonic - in performances of the three Tchaikocsky ballet suites. Here, from my vinyl collection, only two are present - Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty with the Berlin Philharmonic, in a studio recording from the early 1970's.

Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker suite is the only suire from one of his ballets to have been published under his authorship. The other two have different origin but similar stories.


In 1882 Tchaikovsky considered creating a suite from the music to Swan Lake, but it was only seven years after his death that such a suite was finally published as "op. 20a", and it is unknown who made the selection of numbers.

Tchaikovsky first considered the idea of creating a concert suite from The Sleeping Beauty in February 1890, shortly after the ballet's première. In the event he was unable to settle on a selection of numbers, and in 1899 a suite of five numbers from the ballet compiled by an unknown person was published as "Op. 66a".

Happy Listening!

Pyotr Ilich TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
Swan Lake (Лебединое озеро), Suite, op. 20a (TH 219)
The Sleeping Beauty (Спящая красавица), Suite, op. 66a (TH 234)
Berliner Philharmoniker
Herbert Von Karajan, conducting
Deutsche Grammophon ‎– 2530 195
(Vinyl, AAA)
Studio, 1972

Internet Archive URL - https://archive.org/details/01SwanLakeSuiteOp.20A