BBC Scottish SO/Ilan Volkov Hyperion CDA 67697 *****

Stravinsky was a shamelessly idiosyncratic re-worker of other composers' music, his treatment of Pergolesi (and others) in Pulcinella being his most celebrated example. Even better, however, is his 1928 ballet, The Fairy's Kiss, commissioned by Ida Rubinstein at the suggestion of Alexander Benois, to be based on a selection of smaller pieces by Tchaikovsky and with a scenario taken from Hans Christian Andersen's The Ice Maiden.

The resulting ballet is a thoroughly delightful amalgam, Tchaikovsky transmogrified into pure Stravinsky, but without itself quite disappearing. The less well-known Scènes de balletwas commissioned in 1944 as a 15-minute segment for a Ziegfield Theatre show, The Seven Lively Arts, with a specification that it was to be written after the manner of Adam's Giselle. Ilan Volkov's performances are delightfully alert to the intricate stylistic matrices of the two works.

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