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Opening night of the Kansas City Ballet's 37^th production of The Nutcracker illuminated holiday themes of generosity and the value of children on a level beyond the glamour of music and dance when local patron of the arts, Julia Irene Kauffman took the podium to conduct the Overture.  The opening of The Nutcracker featured the debut performance of her 13-year-old granddaughter, Brittany Muriel-Marion LaPointe as Clara, and Kauffman was there to support her in a memorable way, in keeping with her habit of supporting the Arts in Kansas City.  Kauffman, a music degree under her belt and ably coached by Music Director Ramona Pansegrau, led the Overture in a bright and tight reading that began the evening of dazzling music-making, impressive stage settings and delightful dance.

The sight of youngsters donned in finery, solemnly processing on the arms of their doting parents and grandparents about the Music Hall for this holiday tradition might suggest The Nutcracker to be a long-observed rite of the holiday season.  Not so!  This year marks only the 37th annual production by the Kansas City Ballet, in keeping with other companies around the country.

In late December 1890, on the heels of the success of his opera Pique Dame and after the critical success of Sleeping Beauty, Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky was commissioned by the director of the Imperial Theaters, Ivan Alexandrovitch Vsevolojsky to write a ballet for the following season in St. Petersburg in a second partnership between Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa.  Vsevolojsky proposed The Nutcracker of Nuremberg, based on the book by Dumas père, L'Histoire d'un Casse Noisette (The Story of a Hazelnut-cracker) which was inspired by The Nutcracker and the King of Mice, a children's fairy tale written in 1816 by the Father of German Romanticism, E.T.A. Hoffmann.  (Offenbach's opera, Tales of Hoffmann and the ballet Coppélia by Delibes were both inspired by Hoffmann.)  Initially neither Petipa nor Tchaikovsky accepted the commission, feeling that the story was unsuitable for grand ballet.  Petipa was allowed to make changes in the story that would include the creation of the Sugar Plum Fairy.  After Vsevolojsky added the draw of a commission for a one act opera, Tchaikovsky agreed to the task, as well.  He began work on The Nutcracker score at the same time as his opera Iolanthe. 

Tchaikovsky was unhappy with the story changes Petipa made and was dissatisfied with his own work on the score.  He welcomed a break from its composition during a two-month concert tour of the United States in which he conducted the opening concert of Carnegie Hall on May 5, 1891.  He finished the first draft on July 7, 1891, but did not begin the orchestration until January 1892.  In March 1892 he presented a selection of eight of its numbers in The Nutcracker Suite, which received immediate acclaim, and it is said that "every movement had to be repeated."  Once it was completed, Tchaikovsky wrote of his work, "Casse-Noisette is all ugliness."  Both The Nutcracker and Iolanthe were premiered on December 17, 1892 at the Maryinsky Theater to mixed reviews.  "The Opera was evidently very well liked, the Ballet not...The papers, as always, reviled me cruelly," Tchaikovsky wrote. 

Although music from The Nutcracker Suite became immediately popular on concert programs around the world, the complete Ballet was not widely known in the United States until its New York premiere by Balanchine in 1954.  It was first produced as we now know it in the mid 1960s. 

Under the capable leadership of Music Director Ramona Pansegrau, the Kansas City Symphony delivered Tchaikovsky's expertly orchestrated score with élan.  The "Miniature Overture," scored in the high registers of the instruments to achieve an effect of the language of the world of toys, was delivered in splendid balance.  The Kansas City Ballet's production, designed by Todd Bolender, is the perfect extension of Tchaikovsky's sumptuous music with its rich variations in mood and tonal color. 

The starry opening scrim for the "Miniature Overture" yielded to a Victorian backdrop of a mansion cloaked in snow as dancers clad in pastels pantomimed a street scene.  Clean brass tones rang with the "March of the Toy Soldiers" and marching boys danced on stage. 

The first half of the ballet, in which Clara's godfather Herr Drosselmeier appears at the Christmas Eve party of the Silberhaus family to present her with a toy Nutcracker, was given uniformly elegant balance from the Orchestra.  The two highlights of the first half of the program for this reviewer were: 1) the Christmas tree that truly seemed to grow to enormous proportions on stage - speaking to the symbolism of the evergreen tree in winter with its message of the continuity of the spirit as well as a metaphor for the tree of life - and 2) the snow scene, visually enchanting with the aquamarine toned backdrop of snow-laden trees, snowflakes falling from above, the vision of the exquisite movement of the ballerina, and all mirrored orchestrally by the flutes in their high range above the brass and harp, and ultimately joined by the Kansas City Ballet School Chorus, young singers whose high notes matched perfectly with the reedy timbre of the instruments.

The second half of the evening opened to a starry backdrop in indigo that brightened to reveal peppermint pillars that found their voice in the piccolo and flute runs in the orchestra.  It is in this portion of The Nutcracker that the most famous numbers are danced.  Among the outstanding numbers, the scintillating Arabian dance, inspired by coffee and transported to the world of the Arabian Nights tale, was performed to perfection by orchestra and dancers; the "Waltz of the Flowers," with its lilting melody and organic orchestration was beautifully expressed by the ballet Corps onstage, both in movement and in rich colorful costume design; and the Pas de Deux of the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier was enchanting in elegance of movement.  Tchaikovsky's score is a masterpiece of danseuse.  Performed by the Kansas City Ballet to the accompaniment of the Kansas City Symphony, it is given a timeless expression of beauty that magnifies the excitement of the season.

REVIEW:
Kansas City Ballet with the Kansas City Symphony
The Nutcracker
Runs December 16 - 27
Reviewed Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Music Hall
301 W 13^th Street, Downtown Kansas City
For tickets call 816-931-2232 or online at www.kcballet.org

Top photo: Julia Irene Kauffman

By Gayle G. Hathorne

Classical and Vocal Contributor (Past writer)