Choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton is regarded as the "founding father of British ballet." Although the practice of making a great choreographer the central focus of a CD is not common, it is not unprecedented; witness the staying power of Nonesuch's successful 1992 compilation A Balanchine Album. Hoping to strike oil through setting up a similar well, Dutton Digital has released Sir Frederick Ashton: Ballets, which pulls together three works created for the Vic-Wells Ballet and a fourth commissioned for a film project in ...
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Choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton is regarded as the "founding father of British ballet." Although the practice of making a great choreographer the central focus of a CD is not common, it is not unprecedented; witness the staying power of Nonesuch's successful 1992 compilation A Balanchine Album. Hoping to strike oil through setting up a similar well, Dutton Digital has released Sir Frederick Ashton: Ballets, which pulls together three works created for the Vic-Wells Ballet and a fourth commissioned for a film project in which Ashton played a prominent role. The music is performed, excellently well, by the band employed by the Vic-Wells' successor company, the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, under its director Barry Wordsworth.Ashton's key collaborator and sometime nemesis in the early years of the Vic-Wells was composer Constant Lambert, who is represented by two scores dating from the 1930s. The ballet Apparitions, based on the music of Franz Liszt, is both the longest piece on the disc and its greatest...
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