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Vasily Petrenko conducts Tchaikovsky Ballet Music Excerpts from Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker

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Vasily Petrenko’s second recording for the RLPO contains some of the most well-known and best-loved music in all of ballet, from one of music’s greatest melodists.

Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores were revolutionary in their day. With extended musical forms and genuine emotional depths which 19th-century audiences were unaccustomed to, they paved the way for Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Diaghilev to bring Russian ballet explosively to the forefront of 20th-century culture.

The composer originally devised Swan Lake in 1871 as a short story for his nieces to dance to, an idea expanded into four acts following a commission from the Moscow Imperial Ballet in 1875. The opening oboe theme and the image of rows of dancing swans have since become synonymous for Romantic ballet, despite the 1877 company's opinion that it was 'undanceable'.

Fifteen years later, in 1890, came The Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky’s interpretation of Perrault’s fairytale La belle au bois dormant, from which comes the definitive Sleeping Beauty Waltz, followed only a year later by The Nutcracker. Emphasising the lighter aspects of Hoffman’s novella, Nutcracker and Mouse King, Tchaikovsky created one of the most enchanting and magical ballet scores of all, and a Christmas classic.