The Nutcracker

Music has a way of transporting audiences and emoting feelings that can resonate with our souls in a deep, impactful way. Most importantly, music has the power to define our culture for generations to come. Today’s performance features one of the most enduringly popular works of the late-19th century, alongside some much older English folk song melodies. We open with the Pizzicato Polka by Johann Strauss II, which the Viennese “Waltz King” wrote with his brother Josef in 1869 for a trip to Imperial Russia, and is scored for plucked strings and glockenspiel. In 1939, the great British symphonist Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, a work for harp and string orchestra, based on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus found in Luke 16:19-31. The work quotes the melodies from traditional English folk songs and Christmas carols found in the Roud Folk Song Index. Today’s featured work is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, which the Russian master arranged from his ballet score. Although the 1892 premiere in St Petersburg was not deemed a success, in recent decades The Nutcracker has become a holiday season staple of ballet companies worldwide and is now one of the Russian master’s most instantly recognizable works.