Maurice Abravanel became music director of the Utah Symphony Orchestra in 1947 and over the years built it into an excellent ensemble. It had begun to reach its peak at the time of this recording in 1967. Just compare this beautifully executed effort to a reading of Swan Lake excerpts made for Westminster in the late 1950s and you can see how far the orchestra had come in its development. Despite ample recorded evidence, it sometimes seems that Abravanel is not really given his due. He was particularly excellent in ballet, and his Tchaikovsky recordings, this one included, are among his best. He brings a real sense of the dance to the performance without sacrificing a bit of symphonic drama. Producer Seymour Solomon almost always captured the Utah forces in excellent to superb sonics, and this recording is no exception. It has lots of weight in the tuttis yet exhibits singular clarity too. That’s all the good news. The bad is that this reading contains serious cuts, more than a half hour of them, especially in the third act. Though Dorati conducted a complete recording for Mercury in 1954, cuts used to be the style. Rozhdestvensky’s A-plus, totally complete performance from the late ’60s (promised for re-issue by RCA sometime in the future) reminded us once again, this time in stereo, that the complete work is best for home listening, and now it is hard to accept as a first choice anything with cuts. As a supplement, however, and a first take on many individual dances, I would recommend this performance most enthusiastically, its lower rating due only to its excisions. https://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-4111/