It's that time of year where Christmas music takes over commercial radio, or at least at one local station that specializes in oldies. In ballet, a similar phenomenon occurs in December, when stagings of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker proliferate, perhaps even in or near where you live. (Local example here.) This is for very understandable reasons, not least (or perhaps most) because the music is fabulous, and it's a great way to start getting kids involved in ballet and the arts. However, perhaps just because The Nutcracker is so ubiquitous at holiday time, chances to hear the entire ballet on its own, w/o staging, don't seem to happen that much. One such rare chance just occurred over in Manchester, England, c/o the Hallé Orchestra. In fact, you can listen to it tomorrow via teh intertubes and c/o the BBC. More (ish) below the flip....
What got me choosing this as a diary subject here was this review of the Halle's performance by Alfred Hickling in The Guardian, where he notes at the start of his write-up:
"Even the best stage productions of the Nutcracker are uneven. The fault lies with the piece itself: up to the interval it is a proto-Freudian coming-of-age narrative, while the second half is all-dancing confectionery."
Hickling does have a point, which stage directors deal with as they judge fit. While I've not seen the film treatment of
The Nutcracker from 1993 (with an appearance from Macaulay Culkin, no less), my understanding is that it goes a somewhat darker route in the "proto-Freudian" part of the first portion of the ballet. I've only seen one live staging of
The Nutcracker, which definitely took a family-friendly approach in making Act I more in a kids' adventure manner, and not dealing with those Freudian or coming-of-age psychological aspects. If I had to guess, I would think that this is how the overwhelming majority of holiday-time stagings of
The Nutcracker treat the work, in a generally lighter spirit.
Besides this Halle performance, another series of recent performances that feature a world-class orchestra are those with the Cleveland Orchestra, in collaboration with the Joffrey Ballet, at Playhouse Square in Cleveland. Here, basically you have one of the world's best orchestras as the pit band for the Joffrey Ballet. Yet apparently in reaction to perceived issues of audience endurance, this recent Plain Dealer article notes some nipping and tucking of the Joffrey production:
"When the beloved holiday show started raising issues for Joffrey Ballet, the Chicago-based company that mounts it every year did what performing arts groups everywhere have been doing to great works for centuries: made cuts.
What it has now is a production that's not only slightly shorter than the one it presented here in 2012 but one it believes is also more cohesive....
'We want the audience to enjoy the whole show, not to start thinking about the exit,' said Ashley Wheater, Joffrey's artistic director and a Nutcracker veteran. 'I want people to enjoy it all the way to the end.'"
Lewis then tries to tamp down worries about the edits:
"Don't start getting upset. None of the cuts, which add up to eight minutes, is prominent. Only the deepest of insiders, those who hang on every step choreographed by Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino, will detect the lack of certain repeats, interludes and other slight additions tacked on to the work since its inception in 1987.....
Most of the tweaks were made out of an interest in saving time. After 25 years of staging The Nutcracker, Wheater said he's noticed that people in general are less willing to devote more than about two hours to a ballet. Meanwhile, he also pinpointed spots where interest flagged, where younger or inexperienced viewers, especially, grew impatient."
Lewis gave the new production when it hit Cleveland this season two thumbs up
here:
"Where, exactly, the trims were made is tough to discern. So seamless are the revisions, all this viewer noticed in Wednesday's opening-night performance was how swiftly the first act progressed and how Act II never slowed."
The conductor for the Cleveland performances, Tito Munoz, noted one of the less edifying aspects of being a ballet orchestra, namely that you have to follow the dancers' pace, even if that may not always jibe with what feels best musically:
"It's just me and the dancers, and the orchestra has to follow blindly...."Being a ballet orchestra, it's one of the most difficult roles there is, in terms of accompanying. But that's forced me to be better, to anticipate the stage more."
In a way, this is exactly the advantage of a concert performance, namely that all your attention focuses on the music, rather than any stage business (which may involve trying to spot your kid in the production, if s/he is part of the family party scene in Act I or is part of the Nutcracker King's court in Act II), and that the orchestra isn't constrained by having to speed up or slow down, against the grain of the music, to accommodate the dancers when needed. But again, such chances to hear the whole ballet live on its own are rare. Hickling noted in his review one aspect which he felt that conductor Andrew Gourlay elicited from the musicians, getting back to the issue of how to treat the potential deeper waters of the story, or not:
"Gourlay....conducted with the lightest of touches that paradoxically revealed Nutcracker’s kernel of darkness. The gravid descent of the pas de deux swelled with the composer’s raw grief for the recent death of his sister. Even the introduction of the celesta - an invention so new Tchaikovsky that requested that his publisher keep it under his hat - sounded less like a jaded Christmas-jingle box than the ethereal chimes that must have startled the original audience."
One touch that's a bit of a budget stretcher in the score is that Tchaikovsky includes a wordless chorus in the 'Waltz of the Snowflakes' that concludes Act I. In all commercial recordings of the score, a record label can obviously hire a chorus for the occasion and shoulder the expense. However, orchestras are certainly aware of tight budgets these days, so the Hallé got around it as follows, as Hickling noted:
"Though it would have been too much to expect the Hallé’s budget to stretch to a boys’ choir for the wordless “ah-ah” accompaniment to the Waltz of the Snowflakes, the female members of the orchestra gamely sang the parts themselves."
This is to say, of course, that it was probably mainly the female string players of the orchestra who sang that vocal part, while playing their instruments. (The woodwind and brass players would understandably be unable to sing and play their instruments at the same time.) It's actually possible to find out how well the ladies of the Hallé did in their vocalizing, because BBC Radio 3 is airing the Sunday evening performance tomorrow (link
here). Or if you miss it in real time, you have 30 days afterwards to give it a listen. It was actually that line in Hickling's review that made me choose
The Nutcracker for this diary.
If nothing else, it shows how one can waste bandwidth on DK, or on the internet in general, from something so modest (if cute to think about). With that, you can comment on this diary, The Nutcracker, or indulge in the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week.....