Things have changed since I reviewed a recording of Léon Minkus’s Don Quixote almost 30 years ago (7/74). Then the score was scarcely deemed worthy of an LP recording, and Minkus’s music was condemned for being neither symphonic nor ballet music of the standard of Delibes and Tchaikovsky. However, the grand ‘Pas de Deux’ from Don Quixote especially has served to keep Minkus’s name familiar and the ballet itself in the repertory. At its worst, Minkus’s music does its job very effectively, and at its best – at several points of this particular score, with its genuinely Spanish flavouring – it is highly tuneful, colourful and immensely exciting.

Nowadays Don Quixote even has a rival double-CD version: the same orchestra under Boris Spassov. Spassov’s readings are generally faster than those of Nayden Todorov (who is producer, as well as conductor, of the present recording); but this by no means produces any less exciting a result. On the contrary, the wider range of tempi enables the exciting climaxes to achieve their effect all the more powerfully.

Naxos announces this newcomer as ‘in Three Acts, 1869 original version’. ‘Three Acts’, though, seems merely to mean the cutting out of one of the intervals. Certainly the recording seems to contain exactly the same music as the Capriccio, the only textual differences being the sequence of some of the numbers within acts. As for ‘1869 original version’, this is highly misleading, since the recording includes later interpolations by Minkus (interpolations from his 1881 ballet score Soraya) and by a host of other hands, including some added by Solovyov-Sedoy in 1940 that sound totally incongruous. The biography of Minkus, too, errs in dating his Paquita music as 1846-47 instead of 1881, while several of the individual movements seem to be incorrectly identified.

Those who know Don Quixote only for its grand ‘Pas de Deux’ should not hesitate to take this opportunity to own the whole ballet score. It’s brilliantly played and recorded and represents an outstanding bargain. But, oh dear, the documentation!