Swan Lake [Import]

This account of Swan Lake sets a new standard for execution and interpretation. Gergiev conducts the ballet with symphonic richness and intensity. The tempos tend to be moderate, since this is the soundtrack for an actual performance and therefore must give the dancers the kind of pacing they can move to. There aren't many moments when the music is allowed to rush headlong and some moments when you feel a bit of imposed restraint. At first I mistook this for lack of drama, but on a second listen Gergiev's deep feeling for every bar came through. This is the first Swan Lake I've ever heard where none of the numbers feels incidental or inferior in inspiration.

Swan Lake has attracted major condcutors in the past -- Ansermet, Dorati, and Previn, to mention the ones I know fairly well. In all respects Gergiev gets finer playing from his musicians, but Ozawa with the BSO and Sawallisch with the Philadelphians are at the same level. Decca's recorded sound is stupendous in both detail and impact. I wish I could report that Gergiev has done a flawless job, but a few numbers, especially the famous Adagio pas de deux between Siegfried and Odette, are strangely inert. Fortunately, that's a rare exception. On the whole I was transfixed from beginning to end. Highly recommended.

An earlier review goes into some detail about the Mariinsky "performing version," which came about in the 1895 revival that made Swan Lake famous. The order of some numbers was shifted; the theater's music director Riccardo Drigo added new music derived from Tchaikovsky's piano music. The prospective buyer can choose between Gergiev and another very good recording of the Mariinsky score conducted by Viktor Fedotov.

In spite of what the Decca sticker on the box claims this is not a new studio recording of Tchaikovsky's "complete" ballet, since what's featured here is the Mariinsky Theatre version with the cuts, rearrangements of numbers, and interpolations with other Tchaikovsky music orchestrated by Riccardo Drigo for the 1895 staging of the ballet. Be that as it may, I fail to see why we should have the sound recording if the full thing with the movie is also available on DVD, especially because the chosen tempi and approach can hardly be justified without the images. (And, incidentally, the double CD is more expensive than the DVD.)

Valery Gergiev is not a ballet conductor. Moreover, this was among his first attempts at "Swan Lake" and I can't help but thinking he would have been much better off with a real studio recording of the complete score (like he did with greater success for "The Sleeping Beauty" and "The Nutcracker"), instead of this live performance which, taken out of its context, sounds even more bloodless and inert as it does on the DVD. As usual he brings out a lot of the orchestral details and colour of this wonderful music, helped by a stunningly dynamic recording from the Decca engineers, but the drama and theatricality is curiously missing. Surprisingly, the big orchestral numbers like the ouverture, the introduction and the finales of the various acts suffer most from Gergiev's underpowered conducting. Brass, percussion and timpani should ideally have been balanced more forwardly.

When listening through the complete recording one also realizes it falls apart in elegantly crafted moments, with some lovely solo's from the musicians of the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, but a sense of structure which holds it all together is absent. The famous White Swan pas de deux (pas d'action) reflects in this respect the whole recording: there is some exquisite playing by the solo violin, but the whole piece drags because of the tempo and doesn't stand repeated listening.

This is far from being the definitive recording of "Swan Lake". It doesn't even come close - for that rather look in the direction of Evgeny Svetlanov, Antal Dorati, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Ernest Ansermet, or even Pierre Monteux and the hard to find Anatole Fistoulari in abridged versions. If you really need to have the Mariinsky Theatre version of the ballet on CD, look for Viktor Fedotov and the Mariinsky Orchestra.

First of all-- in the 20+ years of seriously listening to classical music it has only been the past couple of years that I have revisited Tchaikovsky. I had found his music brash,saccharine, over sentimentalized etc.. But lately conductors like Gergiev (and his elder statesmen Temirkanov) have made me rethink all this.

I agree with the Santa Fe listener that this recording of Swan Lake sets a new standard. Yes, there are some odd tempo choices and a sizable degree of restraint in many passages but what wins over all is the musicality of the reading. Some day I suspect Gergiev will re-record this piece as a concert performance thus being a bit freer with tempos etc but for now this will do just fine.

So worth buying!

BTW: Gergiev's Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty I think are wonderful. Again, I find myself drawn in beginning to end. A true mark of someone who understands the score in my opinion!