Tchaikovsky Suite

Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) was a Greek conductor who came to America in the 1930s and made many recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Like Wilhelm Furtwangler of Arturo Toscanini, Mitropoulos' height of popularity came just before the advent of modern sound technology, so that many of Mitropoulos' finest recordings are marred by distortion and background noises that may make those recordings practically un-listenable to some classical music enthusiasts (although the new Sony Mitropoulos set has advertised that most of those very rough recordings have been "remastered").

Tchaikovsky - almost alone - saw the possibilities of specially-composed music for the classical ballet, which was hugely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. His secret was to work closely with his choreographer and link music and dance routines at the outset: this proved vital to the stage action and the final success of the whole production. Swan Lake was the first, and Nutcracker the last of Tchaikovsky’s three ballet scores. Following the success of Sleeping Beauty came the request for another ballet, which eventually formed a double-bill with his opera Yolanta. Tchaikovsky agreed, unusually, that some of the Nutcracker music could be played at an orchestral concert before the ballet opened in St Petersburg. At the concert, an enthusiastic audience encored almost every number.

In August 2022, the musicians of the Rachmaninoff International Orchestra gathered in Bratislava to perform their first recording under the direction of founder and artistic director Mikhail Pletnev. There is an acclaimed arrangement of Swan Lake by Mikhail Pletnev, coupled with Rodion Shchedrin's famous arrangement of the Carmen Suite from Bizet's masterpiece.

Russian virtuoso Lev Vinocour tells us in his own liner note that he received tuition from Mikhail Pletnev while a pupil of Lev Vlassenko at the Moscow Conservatoire. At the time he heard Pletnev perform some of his arrangements of numbers from The Sleeping Beauty, and Vinocour records the whole Concert Suite here, alongside a selection of altogether more modest arrangements from the same ballet by Theodor Kirchner (1823-1903)…