This cheap label round-up of poor quality Czech TV broadcasts from the 1980s features those alternately cute and annoying travelogues with ballet of the kind that interrupt the New Year’s Day concert from Vienna. However, the companies involved (the Prague Chamber Ballet and the Ballet of the Slovakian National Theatre) are not considered important enough to be credited on DVD box or booklet-notes, let alone the names of choreographer and director (Václav Kaslík) of the Peer Gynt sequence. The picture quality is primitive and grainy, the sound and transfers likewise. Pesek and his orchestras play well: the Overture and three dances from the Bride have a tangy, forward wind balance which is most appropriate, making it more of a pity that picture and sound synchronisation seems so approximate.

The Vltava film features all the expected illustrations of the tone-poem’s scenario (the river from babbling brook to mighty torrent, merrymaking peasants, etc). The Bride, introduced by a crude summary in American (despite what the language menu promises, that’s all I could get), manages to place all the action in mime and dance within the four orchestral pieces. (The Polka is named on the box as the number ‘Why shouldn’t we be happy?’ but no chorus takes part.)

The Grieg reorders the Suites in more or less the order they come in the play – although ‘Morning’ is removed from Arabia to Norway and ‘Solveig’s Song’ comes twice – to match a series of pas de deux for Peer and his women, shot mostly in studio in front of picture screens. The results would while away a pleasant hour on a plane journey (‘Anitra’s Dance’ looks like an out-take from Carry On Follow That Camel) but are hardly compulsive.