How does Ballet music differ from an Orchestral Suite of the same name?

Question

Now, I've loved Stravinsky's music, ever since 10th grade music appreciation class when we learned that Le Sacre Du Printemps caused a riot at its first public performance. But I discovered to my surprise that all these years, I've been listening to the "Orchestral Suite", not the Ballet per se.

When I saw the Nutcracker at the Kremlin, I thought they rushed the Arabian dance and dragged the French. Was I applying the wrong standards, knowing only the Orchestral Suite[*]?

Now, I know I'm never going to find a Live recording with Nijinsky shouting out his 17-beat pattern over shrieking French ladies, but does a change to an Orchestral Suite involve merely an adjustment of the instrumentation, or are there more substantial changes of content? Missing "filler" moments, unmotivated fermatas, gross alterations of tempo?

[*] And a brief part as a soldier at age 10.

Answer 1

Essentially your intuition is correct--there must be differences for the publisher to have found it necessary to print a new set of music.

In the cases you mentioned, the music was originally written for the ballet; subsequently the composer went back and made some editorial decisions to allow the piece to stand on its own without a dance company. This may also involve breaking the piece up into multiple movements.

Usually musical content is essentially the same, with changes made to timings and instrumentation, since an orchestra performing on their own is going to have more space for instrumentation and more presence from not sitting in a pit.

One last thing I'll note is that in the case of Stravinsky, his ballets like The Firebird and Rite of Spring exist in MANY different versions. He would actually revise a work to update the copyright so as to prevent it from becoming public domain (most composers don't achieve that much popularity over as much of their lifetime)! Also consider that since these ballets were premiered, the concert suites have become much more popular and widely performed, so popular interpretations are going to inform future performances of either the ballet or the concert suite.