We can all appreciate
opera on CD. OK, we miss the visual
element - but, as the large audiences who flock regularly to
non-staged concert performances of opera attest, that is arguably
an aspect of less significance than the music itself and the
purely vocal skills of the artists interpreting those scores.
Ballet, however, is clearly much more of a visual medium. We
watch the dancers on the stage rather than listen to them and
we cannot appreciate their art on a CD. Thus one might be tempted
to ask whether there is any rationale at all these days - when
many very fine recorded ballet performances are emerging from
the archives and appearing on DVD - to justify listening to ballet
scores on CD as stand-alone entertainment.
Well, of course there is. At the most obvious level, it is clearly
impractical in everyday life to sit down fixedly for a couple
of hours in front of the TV screen: it is far more convenient
to enjoy just the music on CD as you vacuum the carpets, wash
the dishes or even drive the car. Moreover, the scores themselves
are often well worth listening to on their own as pure music:
while they may not necessarily be as intellectually stimulating
or challenging as a late Beethoven string quartet or a Mozart
opera, they can often be at the very least life-enriching and
emotionally cathartic - by turns effervescently joyous, tragically
heartbreaking or simply annoyingly foot-tapping - which is, after
all, the quite literal purpose of a ballet score.
There is certainly plenty of music to stir the widest range of
emotions and jerk the feet into motion on this pair of discs
- even without the ability to see any dancers on stage. The website
of English National Ballet (London Festival Ballet’s name
since 1989) makes some play of the company’s historic links
with
Giselle (
see
here) and this well-engineered recording certainly demonstrates
the orchestra and the conductor’s familiarity with and
appreciation for Adam’s well constructed score. Terence
Kern is entirely at home with the appropriate musical idiom and
invariably conscious of the practicalities of supporting the
action on stage: tempi are therefore invariably finely judged
and eminently
danceable. This is a performance that smells
of greasepaint - not just of the recording studio. The orchestra
sounds rich and full, placing
Giselle fully in the tradition
of the 19
th century Romantic ballet scores of which,
in so many aspects, it was the
fons et origo.
Competition is, though, fierce. My own favourite performance
on disc - by the hugely experienced Anatole Fistoulari and the
London Symphony Orchestra (Mercury 434 365-2) may have been recorded
more than fifty years ago but the skills of the original Mercury
Living Presence engineers mean that its sound hasn’t dated
at all. On DVD, I have had immense and repeated enjoyment from
the Kirov Ballet’s 1983 performance starring Galina Mezentseva
and Konstantin Zaklinsky and reliably directed by Viktor Fedotov
(NVC Arts 0630-19397-2).
Le Corsaire has, given its potboiler story of pirate heroics
and low farce, a rather more rambunctious - not to say, at times,
positively raucous - score. The brief extract we have here is
of the ballet’s best-known showpiece, composed by the Music
Director of the Imperial Ballet, the long-lived but unjustly
neglected Riccardo Drigo (you may see Rudolf Nureyev in full
flight
here and
here).
Kern and his orchestra give us an appropriately lively account
of the music. (By the way, here’s a good question for a
quiz: which composers contributed music to Petipa’s production
of
Le Corsaire? Apart from Adam, Delibes, Drigo and Minkus
they were such largely-forgotten luminaries as Cesare Pugni,
Prince Pyotr of Oldenbourg, Baron Boris Vietinghoff-Scheel, Yuli
Gerber, Albert Zebel, Mikhael Ivanov and a certain Mr Zibin who
apparently remains so obscure that not even his first name is
known.)
The Minkus
Kingdom of the shades scene from
La Bayadère,
choreographed by Marius Petipa, is by universal consent one of
the most beautiful in all ballet (
see
here). John Lanchbery, who conducts on this disc, had a close
association with the ballet, re-orchestrating and re-composing
it considerably to facilitate Natalia Makarova’s reconstruction
of its final “lost” act. It seems strange, therefore,
that here he directs the music for the
Entrée of
the 32 ghostly shades at a terribly slow tempo that, one imagines,
would be very difficult to dance to in practice. Bonynge takes
7:58 over it on his Decca recording of the full ballet on 436
917-2. Lanchbery’s conducting on the superb Royal Ballet
DVD of the complete
La Bayadère - on TDK DV-BLLB
- is similarly more up-tempo. However, the slower
tempi to
be found on this new CD do mean that Minkus’s gloriously
ripe melodies, not just in the
Entrée but also
in the later
Pas de deux, emerge with their maximum emotional
impact.
One gripe: someone at EMI needs to revise their reference books.
Not only this CD but two others featuring Minkus’s music
that I have received manage to get his dates entirely wrong.
They would have you believe that Minkus was born in 1827 and
died in 1890. In fact he was born in 1826 and died in 1917 -
so clocking up a full 28 more years of life than EMI seem to
think.
Rob Maynard
London Festival Ballet
Orchestra/Terence Kern (Adam, Drigo) 
