Ernest Ansermet conducts Ballet Music

In June 1948, Columbia Records in New York launched the first-ever commercially viable long-playing records. The Decca 1950 recording of Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka played by the Suisse Romande Orchestra under Ernest Ansermet was one of the first LPs to appear on the market and the reviewer, Lionel Salter, wrote in The Gramophone "This new recording of Stravinsky's masterpiece - which will become, I am sure, the first landmark in the history of LP - lights up the orchestral colours with unprecedented vividness and perspective and all the details of the score are wonderfully clear and excellently balanced."

Ansermet's Petrushka became indeed the benchmark of LP quality, the standard by which all else was measured.

La Boutique Fantasque recording (recorded with the LSO in July 1950) also drew superlatives from the critics.

No doubt Ansermet was the ideal conductor for such recordings. He met Stravinsky in 1912, who recommended him to Serge Dhiaghilev. Ansermet became principal conductor of Dhiagilev's Ballet Russes from 1915 to 1923. In 1918 he formed the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Geneva and was musical director of the orchestra for the next 49 years.. He died in February 1969.