[18/52] Counting down 52 NYCB Nutcrackers this year with stories from NYCB dancers past and present! Today we hear from Andrew Litton, who has been NYCB’s Music Director since 2015:
“I’ve conducted our Nutcracker 78 times and I still look forward to it. Fortunately, very little ever went wrong until one performance two years ago. Tchaikovsky writes for a wordless children’s choir to sing at the end of Act 1 in the part we call ‘Snow.’ I have had the honor of conducting performances in London with a real children’s chorus and it is a sublime musical moment. For a host of reasons, it is completely impractical here to have a real chorus, starting with the sheer number of performances. So, we use a synthesizer played by a pianist. In context it doesn’t sound that bad, but one night somehow the settings on the synthesizer got changed. Instead of the beautiful legato line, out came extremely short notes, sounding very much like the Swingle Singers! [When Andrew recounted this story to me verbally his imitation of the sound was something like ‘bloop, bloop, bloopbloopbloop’ to the tune of Snow] The poor pianist didn’t know what to do, so she kept playing! It was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard! Everyone was laughing both onstage and in the pit. We now have safeguards in place to ensure this never happens again!”
[I asked Andrew to identify his favorite parts in the Nutcracker score]
“My two favorite parts of Nutcracker are # 8 in Act 1 (the music with the bed moving in our production) and Waltz of the Flowers. I think it may be my favorite waltz of all time with all due respect to the Strauss family…”
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