With this transcription and recording, Stewart Goodyear makes a new contribution to the ever-proliferating world of The Nutcracker. ‘Christmas is not complete until I hear or see The Nutcracker’, Goodyear told radio host Julie Amacher.Footnote ¹ The ballet’s performance, adaptation, re-composition, commodification and consumption have become a hallmark of the holiday season since the middle of the twentieth century in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Ben Finane, editor-in-chief at Steinway & Sons and the author of the liner notes, points to the financial implications of this investment through which ‘major American ballet companies today generate around 40% of their annual ticket revenue’.Footnote ²

Having grown up in France, I only stumbled by accident into what dance scholar Jennifer Fisher, in her elegant work of history and ethnography, has dubbed the ‘Nutcracker Nation’ – the composite of communities formed, year after year, through a body of practices, objects and investments across media.Footnote ³ I am the first to poke fun at my own ambivalence toward it. It is tempting to dismiss The Nutcracker as the epitome of trite repetition and blatant commercialism. Part of me frequently wants to apologize for bringing The Nutcracker into scholarly conversations – and, what’s more, into the yearly rituals of my family. Yet, again and again, I find complexity in the ballet’s history and forms, invention in the playful production of adaptations and meanings, and significance in the critique of its politics.

Goodyear’s recording is a case in point. The transcription is an invitation to listen anew to Tchaikovsky’s music. For that very reason, the CD received accolades from Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times, Simon Chin in the Washington Post and Dan Morgan for MusicWeb International – though Chin and Morgan also had some reservations.Footnote ⁴

The CD jacket and liner notes bring to the fore Goodyear’s pledge to the Nutcracker Nation. Goodyear appears on the CD jackets of all his other recordings – of solo piano music by Beethoven, Rachmaninov and Ravel and of concertos by Tchaikovsky and Grieg – but this jacket indexes only the familiar realms of the holiday season, with its tall nutcracker toy placed alongside the gilded Corinthian capital of a column. He is not the only musician to join the fray. Romanian pianist Alexandra Dariescu, posing with Nutcracker toys, casts herself as an active fan on the jacket of her recording of the concert suite (Signum Classics, 2016). Her multimedia project – The Nutcracker and I for piano, ballerina and digital animation, which premiered in London, December 2017 – elaborates on this work of autofiction: the pianist here casts herself with and as Clara and her virtuoso doppelgänger, the ballerina. Dariescu tells her story ‘from little girl to concert pianist’ with the goal of inspiring audience members to ‘use [their] own imagination, to hope, work hard and never give up’.Footnote ⁵

Instead, Mr. Goodyear’s transcription refracts the act of ritual listening: ‘I grew up with the entire ballet’, he says, ‘just listening to it over and over and over again’. Goodyear’s childhood encounters with the work included a cassette tape of the full ballet, an LP of the Nutcracker Suite by Seiji Ozawa and the Orchestre de Paris, and yearly attendance at the National Ballet of Canada.Footnote ⁶ Disney’s Fantasia likely also served as inspiration: ‘I just felt so many parallels between The Nutcracker and Walt Disney and it felt like when I was hearing the orchestration of the ballet, I was seeing Technicolor’.Footnote ⁷

Goodyear’s transcription and recording belong to a long pianistic history. This is not just to say that the transcription evokes the virtuosity of Liszt’s études – think La ronde des lutins – or the miniature character scenes of Schumann’s Carnival, or that Anthony Tommasini hears ‘Mozartean grace’ in the overture. There is also a pianistic history specific to The Nutcracker itself, one that includes the publication, performance and recording (or mechanical reproduction) of transcriptions of the full ballet, the concert suite and excerpted movements for two hands, four hands, two pianos and player piano, by Tchaikovsky, Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev, Eduard Langer, Percy Grainger, Mikhail Pletnev and Nicolas Economou, among others. It also did not elude Steinway & Sons that the recording pertains to the piano repertoire of ballet rehearsals: three tracks (the ‘Spanish Dance’, ‘Pas de deux’, and ‘Final Waltz & Apotheosis’) reappeared in 2017 in an unclassified release, Ballet Class: Piano for Dance, whose image features a grand piano (you guessed it: a Steinway & Sons) and a ballerina in what could be a modern living room.

Yet no mention is made of that history. Goodyear has in mind the orchestra, its polyphony and its breadth of registers and colours. Like the first Sugar Plum Fairy, Antonietta Dell’Era, he offers a muscular display of technical feats, a spectacle of physical prowess. Goodyear regularly trains to perform a ‘Beethoven sonatathon’ – all 32 Beethoven sonatas in a single day.Footnote ⁸ His Nutcracker is no less athletic, and the ambition to capture the full orchestration gives occasion for bravura demonstrations of finger independence, leaps, parallel octaves and runs. At times, as Simon Chin noted, virtuosic ornamentation overruns a melodic line or a harmonic progression. The sung melody in the Waltz of Snowflakes might be one of these passages in which bar-by-bar details obscure the appreciation of a longer melodic line.

This is not to say that Goodyear lacks artistry or musicality. Goodyear’s rendering of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, for example, is one of his most interesting, even if it is less demanding. Far from a run-of-the-mill staccato performance of the melody, Goodyear conjures, through subtle pedal work, the haloed sound of the celesta. Paradoxically, Goodyear’s chiselled Arabian Dance does more to showcase a refined sense of voicing, rhythm, texture and polyphony than more taxing movements like the fast-paced Galop and Dance of the Parents, the breathless Battle Scene, or the busy Waltz of the Flowers. Goodyear builds the ‘Pas de deux’ into a continuous crescendo, in which his resourcefulness and sense of structural pace truly shine. (Roland John Wiley bemoaned Tchaikovsky’s theme as a ‘combination of plain melody and pretentious exposition’ and for those neither particularly moved by the passionate repetition of the descending scales, nor particularly sensitive to the expansive exercises of the principal dancers, the movement is the most excruciating passage of the ballet – and the most readily parodied.Footnote ⁹)

Because Goodyear’s transcription is often a marvel of accuracy, it brings to the fore interesting compositional choices by Taneyev and Tchaikovsky in the original piano transcriptions. Consider, for example, the opening of the first scene. Goodyear has it all: the open fifth in the lower register, the soft ascending chromatic line of the bass clarinet, and high up, the joyous, lilting melody that accompany, on-stage, the bustling of festive preparations. Goodyear’s performance is subtly balanced and effectively more faithful to the orchestration than Tchaikovsky’s simplified transcription, which presents, in equal part, the melody and – staccato and sempre staccato – the low open fifth and chromatic line. As well as the joyous bustling, Tchaikovsky’s transcription suggests something mysterious, something ominous. It quickly evolves, within 18 bars, into more complex harmony as the guests begin to decorate the Christmas tree, that site of the first fantastic scenes and of Clara’s most frightening adventures.

Like The Nutcracker, Goodyear’s recording presents itself under the cover of unbearable fluff. Yet the wonder it elicits is not just the product of seasonal habit. It is also an invitation to listen and think anew.