SIMON RATTLE’S FIRST TCHAIKOVSKY RECORDING: THE NUTCRACKER

“Some of the tunes are so famous that you even forget that someone had to write them: what could be more perfect than the pas de deux after the Waltz of the Flowers, which is just a G major scale? We fell in love with this music, rehearsing and performing it, and we think it is magic.” Simon Rattle

Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker have recorded the most performed ballet of all time, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. The release marks the conductor’s first Tchaikovsky recording and is one of several releases this season celebrating Rattle’s 30th anniversary on the EMI Classics label.

The Nutcracker, in which the boy band Libera makes a brief appearance in the wordless children’s chorus of The Waltz of the Snowflakes, appears in two editions: the 2CD standard version plus the Experience (see here) edition containing the complete ballet score. The different versions contain varying amounts of background material and links to online content.

“The Nutcracker is simply one of the great miracles in music,” says Rattle. “Although I love Russian music, I wasn’t always a huge Tchaikovsky fan. I’ve known The Nutcracker since I was a child, but listening to the whole piece came relatively late. Friends said to me, ‘Have you any idea where Petrushka came from? If you don’t know where Stravinsky stole it all from, you had better listen to the first act of The Nutcracker.’ So I became more and more fascinated by this music. The orchestration is remarkable and revolutionary. Even in terms of introducing a new instrument to the orchestra, the celesta in the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. There are all kinds of other extraordinary touches of orchestration, ideas that sound as though they were written 20 years later. And the fountain of melodic adventure almost beggars belief.”

“The other astonishing thing is that Tchaikovsky could write such original music when the choreographer, Marius Petipa, not only told him what the plot was but how long every section of music was. That now there will be 64 bars where you’ll do this, there’ll be an eight bar transition, there will be this type of music. And Tchaikovsky was probably, at this stage of his life, the most deeply depressive composer there’s ever been. Yet he could write music of such joy and generosity.”

In 1891, the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg commissioned Tchaikovsky to write an opera and a ballet. The composer chose the subject for the opera, Iolanthe, but the ballet subject matter was assigned to him, the adaptation by Alexandre Dumas père of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s children’s fairy tale, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Although Tchaikovsky was at the height of his musical powers, he found the ballet score, complicated by Petipa’s meticulous instructions, extremely difficult to compose and, in a letter to his nephew, even contemplated the possibility of giving up composing altogether “if I can no longer furnish my musical table with anything but warmed-up fare.”

One inspiration during this period was provided by his discovery, during a visit to Paris, of the newly invented celesta, an instrument whose sound enchanted him. Having decided to introduce it in The Nutcracker, he was adamant that, when the instrument was shipped to St. Petersburg, neither Rimsky-Korsakov nor Glazunov should know of it lest they use it before he did.

The Nutcracker story takes place around a Christmas Eve celebration in the Stahlbaums’ grand house with a beautiful tree surrounded by family and friends. Godfather Drosselmeyer, a clock and toy maker, arrives and presents dolls and gifts to all the children. He gives the Stahlbaums’ young daughter Clara a nutcracker that she adores. Her jealous brother, Fritz, grabs it and breaks it but Drosselmeyer deftly repairs it. The guests leave and the Stahlbaum family goes to bed but Clara, worried about her Nutcracker, steals downstairs to check up on him. At midnight, the tree seems to grow bigger. The toys come alive and the room is filled with an army of mice led by the Mouse King. The Nutcracker awakes and leads an army of toy soldiers in a fight with the mice. The mouse army is on the verge of winning when Clara hits the Mouse King on the head with her slipper, causing him to fall to the ground and his mouse army to scurry away. The Nutcracker turns into a prince and leads Clara to the Land of Snow where they are entertained by dancing snowflakes. In the Land of Sweets, the Sugar Plum Fairy treats them to a series of fantastic dances. Clara awakens to find herself by the Christmas tree in her own home. She is still hugging the Nutcracker.

Since Simon Rattle became Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2002, he and the orchestra have maintained a full concert schedule in Berlin, toured extensively and received numerous awards for their recordings and pioneering educational work. Their wide ranging concert programmes encompass works by Bach and Rameau, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Brahms as well as contemporary composers such as Adès, Berio, Boulez, Gubaidulina, Lindberg and Turnage. At the Salzburg Easter Festival, of which he is Artistic Director, Rattle has conducted staged productions of Fidelio, Così fan tutte, Peter Grimes and Pelléas et Mélisande, a concert performance of Idomeneo and a wide range of concert programmes, all with the Berliner Philharmoniker. In 2010, he and the Orchestra concluded a five-year Wagner Ring Cycle project for the Aix en Provence and Salzburg Easter Festivals.

In November 2009, Simon Rattle signed a new contract with EMI Classics extending their exclusive relationship well beyond 30 years and the more than 250 works that he has already recorded for the label. Rattle’s recordings have resulted in many award-winning and ground-breaking releases, principally with the Berliner Philharmoniker, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Wiener Philharmonker. With the Berliner Philharmoniker he has recorded works by Bruckner, Brahms, Holst, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Schubert, Mahler and Debussy resulting in, among others, three Grammy Awards (US), three Classical Brit and three Gramophone Awards (UK) and two Echo Klassik Awards (Germany).