About this Piece

Our midwinter holidays bring light into the darkest days of the year, each in its own way—but music casts the warmest glow. The Christmas Eve setting of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker has helped it to become one of America’s most beloved Christmas traditions (we can thank the San Francisco Ballet of the 1940s), even though the composer had nothing of the sort in mind. By 1960, the potential appeal of updating Tchaikovsky’s score was obvious enough to a savvy musician like Duke Ellington.

The overtures in each case set the tone and show the range of timbre, volume, and articulation possible in each of the respective orchestras. Both are also elegant and balanced, whether in terms of the classicism that Tchaikovsky gleaned from Mozart and Haydn or the carefully calibrated swing of Ellington’s band. What follows is Jeff Tyzik’s orchestration of four of Ellington’s renditions of Tchaikovsky’s “characteristic dances,” which were originally intended to show off the members of Ellington’s band.

Ellington’s “Toot Toot Tootie Toot” is the closest to its source material (“Dance of the Reed Pipes”), although innovations set the tone for what is to come. Where Tchaikovsky had piping flutes and bassoons over a quiet string ostinato, Ellington divides the woodwind section into flutes and clarinets in close alternation over a relaxed groove in the rhythm section, with syncopated hits from the brass. The melancholy, resonant English horn solo becomes a series of wah-wahs with plunger mutes in the trombones. Where the middle portion of Tchaikovsky’s dance is an exoticized whirling dervish, Ellington instead lets the band break out into an improvisatory section with the clarinet in the lead.

In another reversal, Tchaikovsky’s graceful but somewhat melancholy and restrained “Waltz of the Flowers” becomes a rousing series of swing choruses that make up “Dance of the Floreadores.”

Tchaikovsky’s indifference to his own score for The Nutcracker is famous, but the “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” allowed him to showcase a new instrument that fascinated him—the celesta. The twinkling, ethereal sound of the instrument makes for a magical atmosphere—and it is here that Ellington and Strayhorn part ways with Tchaikovsky in all but the melody they borrowed. Over a slow vamp from the drummer, using the evocative toms, the tenor saxophone struts through “Sugar Rum Cherry,” encouraged by occasional wahs and growls in the brass.

The brightness of trumpet in Tchaikovsky’s quick marche militaire figures in Ellington’s “Peanut Brittle Brigade.” The virtuosity shines most clearly in a series of up-tempo, boppish solo choruses for trumpet, clarinet, and alto sax, bringing Tyzik’s suite to a satisfying close.

—Katherine Baber, Ph.D., Professor of Music and Director of the Salzburg Program, University of Redlands