Ballet Adagios is a double-disc collection of dances and excerpts from ballets that generally have slow tempos and lyrical expressions as common features. Taken from Decca's backlist of recordings made between 1960 and 1993, the selections represent the most famous ballet composers, necessarily featuring the most important of all --
Léo Delibes,
Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky,
Igor Stravinsky, and
Sergey Prokofiev -- but also including composers whose operatic and instrumental music has significantly contributed to the dance repertoire, such as
Jules Massenet,
Camille Saint-Saëns,
Aram Khachaturian,
Charles Gounod, and
Johann Strauss II, among others. The performances by the world's leading orchestras are conducted by such prominent maestros as
Vladimir Ashkenazy,
Richard Bonynge,
Antal Dorati,
Charles Dutoit, and
David Zinman, and the atmosphere created by these musicians is appropriately warm and romantic. Because recording technology changed dramatically over the years spanning these performances, the sound is a little variable in tone and background ambience, but all are quite clear and noise-free, and any traces of analog tape hiss are slight on the ADD tracks. The all-digital recordings are clean and well-balanced, and the moderate volume levels running through this appealing twofer are consistent, so there are few spots where adjustments are necessary.