The Nutcracker
for symphony orchestra, 2 children / 1 narrator
To tell the tales of the Arabian nights is a difficult task, since fairytales draw their life from our fantasy, from the pictures that form themselves in the minds' eye of the listener. The music of Rimsky-Korsakov provides us with a rich medium to feed our fantasy. When this is combined with a shadow play, a new world opens up. With just a few characters and pictures, the adventures of Prince Kalender come to life, and the fantastic stories of Sinbad the Sailor become real.
Shadow play and music are complemented by accompanying narration, which unravels the tangled trails taken by the original tales.
"The Nutcracker" is familiar to almost everyone as a ballet. If it's not possible to perform the ballet, however, one must simply make do with the suite.
This suite is supplemented here with texts from the original story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, virtually creating a new piece of music theatre, for a narrator and orchestra.
While the suite is performed, children are seen playing with sweets and toys, just as Marie might have dreamt it after falling into the glass door of her closet: mighty wine gum mice attack the Nutcracker, and yellow ping-pong balls metamorphose into a Chinese army.
