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A collection of music from the five most popular ballets of all time – Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sylvia and Giselle as well as three of the most popular single dance works of all time – Khachaturian’s ‘Adagio’ from Spartacus, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and the ‘Waltz’ from Khachaturian’s Masquerade.

Over 2 hours and 15 minutes playing time.

Full liner notes with synopsis of the featured ballets.

Boris Tchaikovsky, a pupil of Shostakovich, enjoyed a long and illustrious career. Rostropovich once remarked: ‘I consider him to be a genius... one day people will come to know that two great Russian composers bore the same name’.

Four Preludes for Chamber Orchestra was originally conceived as a song cycle, but was promptly banned by the authorities. Boris Tchaikovsky reworked the music into its current chamber form, whilst maintaining the trenchant contradictions, beguiling wit and fleeting moods of the original.

The three delightful Andersen suites derive from music composed for radio plays between 1954 and 1958 but only recovered in 2003. Tchaikovsky himself considered the music for the Andersen Fairy Tales to be one of his best incidental scores.

Andy Teirstein’s background in movement theater (he spent one winter in Mexico performing as a musical clown) have given him an inimical perspective on the dramatic possibilities of composition.

The works heard here translate theatrical physicality into a variety of musical impulses, drawing inspiration from Balkan, Gypsy and Jewish influences, the music of Bartók and Schoenberg, and setting the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Robert Service.

The results juxtapose folk and new-music styles in a series of compelling and highly satisfying scenarios.

“Many listeners will recognize the distinctive sound of the oboe d’amore from having heard it in Bach’s B Minor Mass, St Matthew Passion, where it is used in pairs, or in Ravel’s Bolero. Hearing this instrument solo in these beautiful concerti may be a new experience for some. Telemann and Bach used the instrument brilliantly, requiring agile virtuosity in the fast movements and in the long lines of the heart-tugging slow movements, they made splendid show of the oboe d’amore’s uniquely plaintive timbre.” Thomas Stacy