Decca's Ultimate Ballet: The Essential Masterpieces is a budget box set of five discs covering the major dance works in the classical repertoire; newcomers to the genre can quickly pick up the basics from this generous collection. One can argue that
Tchaikovsky should have been allotted greater space and that at least one of his ballets should have been presented in its entirety, rather than all three represented as suites and squeezed together on disc 1 to make room for
Delibes' complete Coppélia. The Nutcracker, for example, could have fit nicely on a single CD, or an extra disc could have been provided to accommodate either a complete Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty. Beyond this programming quibble, the three
Tchaikovsky performances by
Ernest Ansermet and the
L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the
Delibes,
Chopin, and
Gounod offerings by
David Zinman and the
Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra are fine for their time, being clean analog recordings from 1959 and 1979, respectively. The remaining discs feature an exceptional digital recording from 1991 by
Charles Dutoit and the
Montréal Symphony Orchestra of highlights from
Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, and terrific DDD renditions of
Stravinsky's L'Oiseau de feu and Le Sacre du printemps by
Antal Dorati and the
Detroit Symphony Orchestra, recorded in 1982 and 1983. As must be evident from the span of years between recordings, the sound quality varies from the early discs to the later ones, though it is not so extreme that it will bother any but the pickiest audiophile.