Anyone picking this up on impulse as a budget purchase should feel it is value for money. The modern digital recording is bright, wide ranging and quite full; it is short of being sumptuous, but the big climaxes expand comfortably. The LSO play brightly throughout and Richard Williams's pacing is unexceptionable. He begins The Nutcracker suite with a neat, clean ''Miniature Overture'' and swings the ''Waltz of the Flowers'' (like the waltzes from the other ballets) agreeably. But the characteristic dances are less than ideally projected. the ''Chinese dance'' can sound more humorous than this and the ''Arabian dance'' more sinuously sensuous. In Swan Lake the ''Dance of the Little Swans'' is nicely pert, and the ''Mazurka'' shows him at his best. Apart from The Nutcracker, the other two so-called suites are a small grouping of favourite numbers—only three from The Sleeping Beauty. Still, there are 59 minutes here, all of them vivid, if few really memorable.'