Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake
Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake
The Gramophone Choice
Montreal Symphony Orchestra / Charles Dutoit
Decca 436 212-2DH2 (154' · DDD) Buy from Amazon
No one wrote more beautiful and danceable ballet music than Tchaikovsky, and this account of Swan Lake is a delight throughout. This isn’t only because of the quality of the music, which is here played including additions the composer made after the premiere, but also thanks to the richly idiomatic playing of Charles Dutoit and his Montreal orchestra in the superb and celebrated location of St Eustache’s Church in that city. Maybe some conductors have made the music even more earthily Russian, but the Russian ballet tradition in Tchaikovsky’s time was chiefly French and the most influential early production of this ballet, in 1895, was choreographed by the Frenchman Marius Petipa. Indeed, the symbiosis of French and Russian elements in this music (and story) is one of its great strengths, the refinement of the one being superbly allied to the vigour of the other, notably in such music as the Russian Dance, with its expressive violin solo.
This is a profoundly romantic reading of the score, and the great set pieces such as the Waltz in Act 1 and the marvellous scene of the swans on a moonlit lake that opens Act 2 are wonderfully evocative; yet they do not overshadow the other music, which supports them as gentler hills and valleys might surround and enhance magnificent, awe-inspiring peaks, the one being indispensable to the other. You do not have to be a ballet aficionado to fall under the spell of this wonderful music, which here receives a performance that blends passion with an aristocratic refinement and is glowingly recorded.
