Khachaturian: Spartacus; Gayaneh / Glazunov: The Seasons

Khachaturian's popular ballet scores benefit from his vigorous leadership and the surprisingly idiomatic playing of the Vienna Philharmonic. All the favorite crowd-pleasers are here, including the Sabre Dance. This pairing of ballet suites was a demonstration disc back in LP days and the engineering is still impressive. For those not on Khachaturian's wave length (he does skate perilously close to kitschy vulgarism), the generous filler is a delight--Ansermet's dynamic account of Glazunov's ballet. Its four movements depict the four seasons in an idiom flavored by Tchaikovsky and Glazunov's teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, and the music's all the more fetching for it. Ansermet sometimes could be a bit too sedate, and his orchestra was never a world-class group, but his conducting is nothing short of vivacious here, and the orchestra, captured in vivid sound, is with him all the way. --Dan Davis