The first time I stood in front of the Great Falls Symphony was for the 2016 holiday concert, as a Music Director candidate. For that reason (and others), the Symphony’s holiday concert has always held a special place in my heart. 

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Holiday programs always emphasize tradition and familiarity, reflecting many people’s desires to celebrate continuity, family, and community during this time of year.

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It may be a surprise that this concert represents the first time the GFSA has performed Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite in its original orchestration since that 2016 program. (We performed a pandemic-era small ensemble version in 2020.) If ever there was a piece that needs no introduction, it’s this one, and not just because it’s so well known: When Tchaikovsky and his collaborators adapted E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” for ballet, they removed a huge chunk of the plot, so that the whole second act takes place after the original story has finished, with the protagonist Clara, newly crowned queen of the Land of Sweets, sitting back to watch a series of dances, much as the audience is doing. In other words, once we reach the third movement of the suite (the iconic celesta feature Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy), the drama has been (essentially) completed, and it’s all over but the dancing.

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The Nutcracker’s Waltz of the Flowers is one of two seasonal waltzes to feature on this program, the other being Émile Waldteufel’s Skater’s Waltz. Born in Strasbourg on the French-German border, Waldteufel was something of a French Johann Strauss, Jr., a composer and bandleader whose activities focused on music for entertainment and dancing. Working as conductor for both the French government and the private sector in London, Waldteufel churned out literally hundreds of the waltzes and polkas popular in his day. He wrote the Skater’s Waltz, filled with graceful gliding melodies and not-so-graceful crash-landing scales, in 1882, inspired by the skating rink in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne.