The most beloved Christmas ballet, The Nutcracker has long been a performance that, regardless of the season, gives a feeling of a magical holiday and fabulous changes. A wonderful story about a handsome prince, enchanted into an ugly doll, and a kind girl Masha, who helps the Nutcracker defeat the terrible Mouse King and find happiness, invariably attracts both children and adults.
The wondrous music of this ballet is so well known to everyone since childhood that it is sometimes difficult to imagine how innovative it was for its time. Tchaikovsky incredibly expanded the scope of characteristic dances: in The Nutcracker there is a gallery of bright childish portraits (it is not for nothing that it is called a “childhood symphony”), and fantastic images of toys and mice, and a luxurious parade of sweets by Konfiturenburg. How infinitely far ahead of the schemes of the national old ballet is the suite of delicious drinks that the audience is treated to in Act II: thick, burning Spanish chocolate; Arabic coffee, whose music seems to envelop the stage with fragrant smoke; exquisite, like a Chinese ceremony, tea. The composer made an extraordinarily generous gift to the artists: in The Nutcracker not only human characters, but every object is personified,
The inventive orchestration deserves special attention: for example, in the scene of the war of mice and soldiers with a fraction of small drums, the sounds of toy battle fanfares, flickering mouse running and squeaking. The pearl of the score of The Nutcracker is the crystal dance of the Dragee Fairy, in which Tchaikovsky, for the first time in Russian musical literature, used the celesta, invented just a few years earlier, an instrument with a transparent, “melting”, truly bewitching timbre. And yet the main secret of the success of the music of this ballet lies in the fact that, like the plot, it has that incorruptible freshness and youth that always captivates and always pleases.
Among Tchaikovsky's ballets, The Nutcracker received, perhaps, the largest number of interpretations with various semantic accents. The Primorsky Stage of the Mariinsky Theater presents him in the expressive choreography by Eldar Aliyev, which is based on the original script by Marius Petipa. This is a real New Year's extravaganza with magnificent costumes and decorations, filled with explosions of ruddy children's laughter and the coniferous smell of a festive tree.
