A little sneak peek at the upcoming release

We are less than a month away from the release of Delibes: Sylvia/Coppélia featuring the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra under the direction of Martin West.

A little from the album’s liner notes about Sylvia…

Sylvia was given its premiere in Paris at just about the time Tchaikovsky completed his score for the earliest of his own great ballets, Swan Lake, and about a year before that work’s premiere in Moscow. In a frequently quoted letter to his colleague and former pupil Sergei Taneyev, Tchaikovsky wrote of Sylvia as “the first ballet in which the music is not only the principal interest, but actually the only interest…It exudes such charm, such elegance, such abundance of inventive rhythm and harmony. If I had know this music earlier I would never have dared to write Swan Lake.” His judgement has been confirmed and reconfirmed many times over since then.

While Coppélia and Sylvia are alike distinguished by the qualities already mentioned, the two scores are as different from each other as their respective scenarios demand. Sylvia, or The Nymph of Diana, with its scenario by Jules Barbier and the Baron de Reinach, represents what the illustrious 20th-century choreographer George Balanchine described as “a return to mythology”: a “return” in the sense that ancient tales of Olympian gods and nymphs and satyrs constituted the substance of so many earlier French ballets…

And to really pique your interest, enjoy listening to this sample from the Valse Lente!