What is your favourite piece of ballet music?

Im wanting to eventually write one, and I dont have much knowledge of ballet music, so i thought...why not post a stupid (curteously quoted from DOFTS) thread asking people what their favourite pieces are.

I particuarly like the ballets of stravinsky...The Firebird and The Rite of Spring.

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin.

Appalachian Spring and Rodeo by Aaron Copland.

I particularly like ballets that are full of any dynamic energy and sexual energy, like those of Stravinsky

I was going to say "In before Stravinsky!" but.... damn.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Tchaikowsky's ballets, particularly "The Nutcracker." I really enjoy them. Dramatic and passionate, yet still somewhat proper. I have fond memories of playing it for a number of years in a pit orchestra - back when smaller companies still used pit orchestras; none of us ever got rich off what we made in that pit, but I guess it still got too expensive to sustain.

I'd also like to see a staging of a Delibes ballet sometime, the Mazurka from "Coppelia" being a concert favourite of mine.

Well lately, people are forgetting that many standard Stravinsky pieces are actually ballets. I love them. But if we are talking a true ballet, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet!!! Amazing.

Appalachian Spring, enough said.

(Note I never said all your threads were stupid, I just said that threads you have been posting were stupid.)

I love The Nutcracker but I espically love Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. I watched a video the other day on the first performence of it, it was funny with the crowd going nuts. The ballet part of it made me laugh to be honest.

Seriously, the finale to swan lake..the music alone is fit for an "orchestra-alone" performance, coupled with the ballet and the simply fantastic beautiful finale, it is tear jerking (especially with the tragic ending when all the swans die)

Prok and Shosta ballets.

Hmm... Tchaik and Stravinsky...

Russian make good ballets....