Quality of the sound in ballet productions?

[SpanCox]

I am about to buy some DVD:s of ballets my wife and I really enjoy.

We have a great home theatre, which could be perfect for a high class ballet evening.

One concern though, as I have understod it all ballet productions are recorded in plain stereo?

I can live with only two channels audio, but it has to be two _good_ channels.

Is the audio in ballet productions equal to the quality on classical music CD/DVD:s?

I understand that there must be better and worse quality productions out there, but maybe you could advise me what _not_ to buy?

Subjects of our initial interest would be these:

La Fille Mal Gardee (Royal Ballet), The Royal Ballet, Lesley Collier & Michael Coleman

Swan Lake - Tchaikovsky (Widescreen), The Royal Swedish Ballet, Nathalie Nordquist & Anders Nordstrom

The Nutcracker (Rudolf Nureyev) (5.1/DTS), Merle Park, Rudolf Nureyev & The Royal Ballet

or

Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker (Royal Ballet), The Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House Orchestra & Shirley Laub

We would be grateful for any asssisance in this matter.

Best regards,

Thomas Koos

[Andre Yew]

There are some ballet DVDs that have multichannel sound. Some of the HD releases (in BluRay) even have multichannel PCM without any lossy encoding (ie. Dolby Digital or DTS). But most of their sound quality is about average.

The only DVD that stands out in my mind for its audio quality and musical quality is the TDK Giselle with Zakharova/Bolle. I have never heard that score played any better or with more expression than on that DVD.

From your list, of the ones I've seen, I'd say the Royal Ballet Nutcracker (with Cojocaru/Putrov) is probably the best, though the score is played exceedingly slowly.

--Andre