I just got the Andrew Mogrelia-conducted 3-CD set of the complete score to Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty ballet (Naxos 8.5500490-92). While it sounds pretty good, I thought the tempo in some spots was just a little slow for my taste.

Here's the question: who has the best performed version of this ballet score on CD? I've heard good things about the complete score recording done by Valery Gergiev leading the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra from 1993, though there has been some complaints about the somewhat poor quality of the acoustics. I know there are several other versions from the likes of Previn, Dorati, etc. but most of them are usually abridged performances.

Richard Bonynge complete Tchaikovsky ballets on Decca for dance tempi.

Gergiev for listening and singing along.

I also love the Mark Ermler ones of highlights, too......

Abridged? I find that most complete recordings of ballets, especially the big 3 Tchaikovskys, are entirely too UNabridged. No performance cuts are taken, so the flow of choreography goes on in my head, interrupted by music that has been deleted from production. Nutcracker is about the only one that doesn't get into this bind very often.

What's a musical score version?
If you want to have the best CD recording of the Sleeping Beauty, I'd go for Antal Dorati - Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Not abridged in its original 3-CD release (nla), yet in the current version they criminally omitted the entr'acte after the Panorama in order to make it fit on 2 CDs. Evgeny Svetlanov is pretty exciting as well, with one of the most beautiful Panorama's ever comitted to disc, but the unbalanced, harsh Soviet-time recording may be considered a letdown.

Well, given that CD versions of Tchaikovsky's ballet music are often NOT the version you hear during a live performance, no wonder why they're performed as Tchaikovsky originally wrote them. I believe that the CD releases of the music from Swan Lake as conducted by Viktor Fedotov in 1989 and Valery Gergiev in 2006 are representative of what we would hear in a live performance of Swan Lake, especially with the "Black Swan pas de deux" music moved from Act I to Act III (or as the Russians call it Act II) and the valses from the final Act.

I believe Nutcracker doesn't have this problem because this ballet is so much shorter than the other ballets Tchaikovsky wrote music for. As such, most CD releases of the music is pretty much what you hear in a live ballet performance.

There's the rough-and-tumble BBC Legends recording by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It's the one I ended up with because I couldn't find the Dorati version, but it seems to do the job. It's 2hours 20minutes--no dances omitted but little cuts here and there.

Its character may have something to do with the fact that the bass trombonist was caught in traffic and was an hour and a half late and Rozhdestvensky "understandably livid," according to the liner notes by Laurie Watt. "He refused to start without the full orchestra: the importance of the bass trombone part would have made it impossible for the hapless player to creep in and join the music at a later point."

A version of this situation was the subject of this Sempe' New Yorker cover of April 14, 2008.

New Yorker achives

Interesting you mention the live Rozhdestvensky one. Around the same time (literally days before/after) he made a studio recording (also with the BBCSO) which was released at the time on LP on the BBC's own label in the UK, and on Eurodisc in mainland Europe. I've been trying to find out for some time whether it's ever been out on CD, but I cannot find any trace of that, so I gather it hasn't.

Unlike the live version (which is "slightly abridged"), the studio version was complete, and from the few references I've been able to find, it was very good indeed. It was highly praised in the Gramophone magazine at the time (Sept 1980). The BBC Legends live version (given a Rosette in the Penguin Guide -- whatever you may think of that publication), has been criticised elsewhere as having harsh-ish (not ideal) sound, and for the brass (understandably) sounding a bit tired towards the end. It really is a shame that the BBC are letting the studio version gather dust in their archives in favour of the imperfect live version. But it's one to look out for in the future, who knows..

In the meantime I find the Bonynge version very satisfying, even though the recording itself is rather over-rich, Decca overegging the pudding a bit (as in the other Tchaikovsky ballets also; maybe a sympathetic new remastering would help). For a perverse kind of pleasure, I occasionally listen to Pletnev's bizzarly fast-paced reading (you can almost see the producer sitting there with a stop-watch thinking, "we're gonna get this baby in on two CDs whatever it takes!"). It also features a kind-of x-ray-vision-type clarity of sound (and left/right devided violin desks) which allows one to hear every tiny detail of the score in a quite unnatural way. But it completely lacks any sense of magic, which this of all ballets simply cannot do without. It too was highly praised in the Gramophone as well as the Penguin Guide, but I would certainly not recommend this version to anyone as their only complete Beauty on CD.

I've not heard Previn's version, but I've read good things about it -- anyone familiar with that one?

Previn's ballet recordings have always received a lot of praise in the Gramophone and Penguin Guides (as indeed have most of his discs), but I frankly never warmed for any of them. I find his readings very neutral and lacking in character, while the sound is rather typically EMI from that period and recording venue - boxy and harsh. If you need an "English" Beauty than I would go for John Lanchbery and the Philharmonia, also on EMI, but a lot better recorded and played with balletic elegance and refinement missing with Previn - now also in a bargain series on 2CD and thus sadly omitting a couple of numbers.

Pletnev's clinical recording is indeed to be avoided. The only interesting thing about it is as mentioned the left/right division of the violins, which creates a different soundscape in a few places.

Co-sign: Dorati delivers the 5 star performance.

Since the iTunes Music Store and the Amazon MP3 download service doesn't need to consider fitting all the music into two CD's, how about either one of them offering the Dorati-conducted full version for downloading?

These services offer commercially available CD's not complete recordings.

Ditto, ditto, ditto. Marvelous recording.

I have to respectfully disagree here! Both the iTunes Music Store and Amazon MP3 download service here in the USA often offer special versions of album releases with extra tracks (Amazon did it recently with Enya's current album And Winter Came... by adding an Amazon-exclusive extra track if you downloaded the whole album). Since downloaded music doesn't have to fit within the 74 to 80 minute limitation of a commercial CD, both services could easily offer the unabridged version of the Dorati-conducted version of Sleeping Beauty with no problems.

Theoretically they could of course. But we're not considering "special" versions of albums here with bonus tracks resulting from specific agreements between record labels and download services. In the case of Sleeping Beauty these are CDs that were once released complete, but have reappeared for economical reasons in edited form, missing out a few tracks here and there. (And, besides, which music-lover would bother with a full-length Sleeping Beauty in MP3 format? )

I don't think that's the point. 3rd party online vendors wouldn't have access to those "missing tracks" unless the record companies made them available to them separately from the already available (incomplete) CD versions.

If for instance EMI made the "missing tracks" available from the wonderful complete Sylvia & Coppelia (Paris Opera Orchestra, cond. Jean-Baptiste Mari, 1977/78), I'd buy/download them in a flash (even though I already have the existing CD versions which contain about 80% of the music). Mind you, I'd *only* buy those missing tracks, not the whole lot..

Yes, but then as wave files, or in some lossless format, not as MP3's.