PERFORMERS:
Mariinsky Children’s Chorus and Symphony Orchestra
Children's Chorus Master: Dmitry Ralko
Conductor: Valery Gergiev
PROGRAMME:
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Music of the ballet The Nutcracker
Running time 1 hour 20 minutes
The concert has no interval
Arguably no other work by Tchaikovsky is as popular today as The Nutcracker. The music has long since become part of world music – it suffices to mention that in the 20th century Walt Disney and Duke Ellington both made use of it.
In Tchaikovsky’s ballets the music is a component that has equal status with the on-stage plot, and certainly not just an accompaniment and a metrical reference-point for the dancers. “Ballet is the same as a symphony,” said Tchaikovsky who had written The Sleeping Beauty two years earlier; the composer also developed this idea in The Nutcracker. The music of The Nutcracker took on a life of its own almost half a year before the ballet was first staged. In March 1892 the suite from the ballet, arranged by Tchaikovsky himself, was performed at a concert and proved a great success with the public.
The music of The Nutcracker is a dialogue with different epochs and genres; the refined overture, the pompous procession and the early German Grossvater Tanz (Grandfather’s Dance) in Act I remind us of a gallant era; the night-time scene with the battle is without doubt a tribute to the tradition of German romantic fantasy, truly Hoffmannesque music. Lastly we have the music of Act I – looking forward into the 20th century.
Act II of the ballet, according to the libretto a grand divertissement and already with almost nothing in common with Hoffmann’s plot (which is exhausted in Act I), presented a well-known difficulty for Tchaikovsky. “I sense my utter inability to bring Confiturenburg to life in music,” the composer admitted in a letter to his brother Modest. But a solution was found and it was precisely Tchaikovsky’s music itself that was to be the factor that ironed out the uneven dramaturgy of the libretto.
The scene of the arrival in Confiturenburg is written in an almost impressionistic style; the composer wrote the scene of the magical castle using exclusively timbre means (the tremolo flute, the high register of the bassoon, the arpeggio of the strings and the celesta), at times not even using bold thematic structures. In the suite of dances which follows this scene Tchaikovsky appears as a master of orchestral writing, able to depict the most differing degrees of musical expression – exoticism (the Arabian and Chinese Dances), pastorale qualities (Dance of the Shepherdesses), irony (Mother Gigogne) and a mysteriously fantastical flavour (Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy; for the performance of this number Tchaikovsky brought from Paris a new musical instrument – the celesta). But in the middle passage – Waltz of the Flowers – there are tragic intonations, while in the culmination of the famous Adagio we are reminded of themes of destiny from his symphonies. The music reminds us that Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker is something greater than just a children’s Christmas fairy-tale, and the question of its finale – despite being an apotheosis in major key – remains an open one.
© Mariinsky Theatre, 2015/Vladimir Khavrov
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