Baron Frédéric d’Erlanger (1868–1943) was a banker and a composer of sufficient talent and reputation (and, possibly, financial resources) to have a violin concerto played by Fritz Kreisler. He was a naturalized British citizen whose father was German and whose mother was American. It appears that his banking activities didn’t inhibit his composing, for he wrote a good many compositions, many of which were performed. His score for the ballet Les cent baisers made enough of an impression to be partially recorded (I assume it runs longer than 16:25) by Antal Dorati. From 1933 to 1941, Dorati shared conducting duties at the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, a descendant of Diaghilev’s celebrated Ballets Russes, with Efrem Kurtz; they must have been a formidable combination. In 1941, Dorati left to become chief conductor for (American) Ballet Theater and also contributed several arrangements that became popular ballet scores: Graduation Ball (Johann Strauss, Jr.) and two Offenbach-based delights, Bluebeard and Helen of Troy. In 1946, he took over the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and, except for recordings, left the ballet world for good and went on to become the music director of several orchestras, including those in Minneapolis, Washington, DC, and Detroit, as well as several European orchestras—not bad for someone who believed that being perceived as a ballet conductor had held back his career. D’Erlanger’s musical language appears to be the late-Romanticism of the celebrated Hollywood composers. It could pass for something written earlier, and is a charming, danceable score and, possibly, the only d’Erlanger piece to be recorded.

The Fairy’s Kiss (Le baiser de la fée) is a 1929 dance score in which Stravinsky manipulates mostly unfamiliar Tchaikovsky tunes, partly as a tribute to a composer he particularly admired. Dorati recorded only the “Pas de deux,” which runs just under eight minutes. The variation and coda zip along so fast that I assume the conductor was only too aware that a 12-inch 78 side could only contain a little more than four minutes of music. This is also the case with the Chabrier-Vittorio Rieti Cotillon score, in which Dorati takes the “Scherzo-Valse” and “Danse villageoise” about as fast as they can be played. George Balanchine choreographed it for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo during the early 1930s, and it seems to have made a great impression. Bernard Taper’s Balanchine biography puts it this way: “Cotillon was a heartbreak ball which seemed to express, for all its tenderness, the insecurity and desperate gaiety of one moment of time, over which hovered a sense of fatality and doom. A. V. Coton, in A Prejudice for Ballet, has written: ‘As a creation of atmosphere—in the absolute sense, not an atmosphere of time and place—nothing else in ballet compares with Cotillon.’ Many who saw it still regard it as Balanchine’s masterpiece.” Unfortunately, he never revived it with his own company, the New York City Ballet, but did use Chabrier’s music for the later ballets, Bourée fantasque and Trois valses romantiques. Not having seen Cotillon, I don’t know if it consists of only the “Menuet pompeux,” “Scherzo-Valse,” “Idylle,” and “Danse villageoise,” but that’s all Dorati does.

Leonid Massine, the choreographer of Scuola di ballo, described its birth this way: “I had always thought that Boccherini’s sprightly music would be suitable for a ballet, and when the previous winter I had gathered together a number of his shorter pieces ready for orchestration, I remembered the success of Les femmes de bonne humeur [“The Good-Humored Ladies”] and re-read some of Goldoni’s plays in search of a subject . . . Scuola di ballo might have been written for my purpose. It concerns an impresario, Fabrizio, who visits a ballet school in search of a new prima ballerina. The humor of the plot arises from the efforts of the old ballet-master to persuade him to engage Felicita, the least talented of his pupils, in place of one of the more promising youngsters . . . I concentrated on evoking the atmosphere of a ballet school as I remembered it from my own classes and my later lessons with Cecchetti.” Much of the Boccherini music, which was arranged by Jean Françaix, came from his string quintets. Once again, I cannot say whether or not this is the complete ballet, but it’s what was on the 78s and the Columbia Entre LP, whose notes suggest that there may be more music. The rest of the CD is devoted to some colorful, conventional exotica by Dargomizhsky in the Glinka vein. I wouldn’t have thought such charm to be part of his arsenal. The LPO’s strings get put through their paces here. I found this collection to be a pleasant souvenir of what are probably defunct ballets that none of us may ever see. Whatever its shortcomings with respect to annotations, Dutton has done a good job on the 78 transfers.

The Dorati-Françaix connection in the Scuola di ballo recording reminded me of two personal anecdotes: a colleague of mine once wrote to Jean Françaix, asking him how his name should be pronounced. Several weeks later, he received a reply. Françaix said that the French always pronounced it “Frahn-SAY” but his family, which was Belgian, preferred “Frahn-SEX.” He said either pronunciation was fine with him. I had a similar experience with Antal Dorati, who said that the correct pronunciation was “DOR-Ah-Tee” with just a slight emphasis on the “Dor.” (“English-speakers make it sound Irish!”) However, he added that he had gotten so used to being called “Antal Dor-AH-tee” all over the world that the mispronunciation didn’t bother him any more, so it was all right to say it either way.

FANFARE: James Miller