I think you will love this music too: Tchaikovsky: Complete Ballets

Tuesday, December 6, 2022

Tchaikovsky: Complete Ballets

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

This month on our podcasting channel, we are sharing many of our old Tchaikovsky montages, and this month’s Cover2Cover fits into the Tchaikovsky theme, with this mammoth Brilliant Classics YouTUbe post containing all three complete Tchaikovsky ballets.

Tchaikovsky’s ballets, Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, are by far the most popular ballet music ever written, and count among the master’s most famous works. Tchaikovsky, tormented genius, found relief in writing these brilliant, featherweight works, conjuring up fantasy worlds of feel good fairy tales.

Though today all three ballets are much praised and performed, this was not always so. It took time for their status to be established, and reactions to early productions were decidedly mixed during Tchaikovsky’s lifetime. Particularly saddening is the fact that the great composer died believing Swan Lake, perhaps his most celebrated ballet today, to be a failure – although this is in part due to the fact that the choreography most associated with the work today was developed after his death. The Sleeping Beauty, meanwhile, suffered the insult of a lukewarm imperial reception on its presentation to Tsar Alexander III in 1890; and Tchaikovsky himself believed The Nutcracker to be an inferior work, ‘infinitely worse than Sleeping Beauty’, in his own words.

In order to make the listening easier, I separated the three works into individual tracks in our music archive (and on the podcasting channel, with their publishing dates spread out throughout the month of December). Though all te music is performed by the Royal Philharmonic, each ballet is assigned to its own conductor.

Happy listening!