Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker [plus Sleeping Beauty: Aurora's Wedding]

A favourite ballet all round the year, but a perennial at Christmas-time, Tchaikovsky's evergreen Nutcracker has never perhaps received as luxurious a recorded performance as that of Charles Dutoit and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. The coupling - Aurora's Dream - is a suite of dances, mostly from the last act of The Sleeping Beauty, put together by Sergei Diaghilev to enable him to give performances of this music without throwing him into heavy debt (which was the case with his staging of the lavish production with the Ballets russes at London's Alhambra Theatre in 1921).