This coupling was positively reviewed on LP by MEO and I share his enjoyment, though falling short of real enthusiasm for the music itself. As he rightly says, Roussel's melodies are ''not obviously tuneful'', but there is more to it than that. Given the story of the abandoned Ariadne and her meeting with the god Bacchus/Dionysus, treated also by Monteverdi and Richard Strauss (as well as Mary Renault in her novel (The King must die), the composer goes through all the right motions, but this work with its admittedly powerful final pages (including a Bacchanal owing something to Ravel's Daphinis et Chloe) does not much engage my emotions, while elsewhere too one is conscious of a certain 'incidentality' of music that was designed to accompany stage action and does not wholly stand on its own.
The earlier (1912) ballet-pantomine Le festin de l'araignee does not aim to stir quite so deeply, one feels, and is correspondingly more convincing. These fragments symphoniques from the ballet are fluent and charmingly scored and if this music too does not prove wholly memorable it is very agreeably and intelligently put together, telling a fable of insect-dimensions adventure in a garden dominated by a spider's web. There are certainly moments here where Roussel's music speaks with real passion, as in the exquisite ''Danse de l'ephemere'' in which a mayfly dances for the last time in its four-hour lifespan, and indeed all that follows it to the quiet end at nightfall. The performance is idiomatic and the CD sound is faithful.'