Tchaikovsky himself doubted that The Nutcracker was his best work — he said so, repeatedly, with a weary candor that posterity has largely ignored. What he couldn’t have anticipated was how thoroughly the ballet would outlive his reservations, becoming at once the most beloved and most condescended-to piece in the symphonic repertory. Every December it gets performed to death and recorded still more promiscuously. Which makes a genuinely distinguished account worth marking.
Mikhail Pletnev’s traversal with the Russian National Orchestra — his own ensemble, the one he built from scratch after the Soviet collapse — is, for the most part, exactly that.
Start with the orchestra itself. The RNO plays with a polish that would have been unthinkable from Soviet-era ensembles, and the contrast with, say, Svetlanov’s USSR State Symphony is not merely a matter of degree. It’s a different aesthetic entirely. The strings are warm without being woolly; the horns hold their pitches with a firmness that doesn’t harden into rigidity; the woodwinds — and this matters enormously in this score — keep their individual characters while behaving like a family rather than a collection of soloists. Tchaikovsky’s orchestration here is more sophisticated than it looks on the page, all those inner-voice details and refined antiphonies between choirs, and an orchestra that can’t manage real blend tends to make the music sound thinner than it is.
The great Ansermet recordings from the early stereo years — his two accounts with the Suisse Romande, particularly the second — remain reference points, and the RNO can’t quite match that ensemble’s particular translucence, that quality of light seeming to pass through the texture. But it surpasses Ansermet’s players in sheer technical command. Which is not nothing.
Pletnev’s interpretive instincts are, characteristically, his own. He is, after all, one of the supreme pianists of his generation, a player who hears inner voices that most conductors walk right past. That gift shows in small but telling moments — the way the clarinet eases into the middle section of the opening scene, as if the music were remembering something rather than announcing it; the introductory bars of Grandfather’s Dance played with a sense of gathered momentum, a deep breath before the downbeat, rather than as a mere tempo marking dutifully observed.
Act One is more uneven than what follows. The tutti passages are grand and full — Pletnev clearly has no interest in mincing this music into drawing-room delicacy — but finesse occasionally goes missing when the energy is highest. In the “Petit galop des enfants,” a passage around the two-minute mark moves with real lift, the 6/8 feel exactly right, rhythmically alive without being mechanical. But shortly after, the strings and winds clutter the texture in a way that buries the trumpet’s melody entirely — an odd lapse from a director so attentive to balance elsewhere. There are moments in the Scène where heavy chords simply slog, and in the Departure of the Guests, some coordination between the reed triplets and the main theme grows precarious. These aren’t catastrophic failures. They’re the kinds of rough patches that a live reading might smooth over with adrenaline, but that a release — where you can stop the tape and listen again — tends to magnify.
Then the forest scene arrives. And something shifts.
The lyrical unfolding of that sequence, the way Pletnev lets the music breathe and expand without either rushing or dawdling, is genuinely lovely. The Waltz of the Snowflakes opens with a darting, almost anxious energy that immediately tightens the attention — this is not the perfunctory swirl you often get, but something that feels dramatically motivated, as if the children’s world is becoming genuinely strange. Act Two sustains this quality. The opening is leisurely and spacious, and when the Nutcracker makes his entrance, Pletnev resists every temptation toward portentous grandstanding — a real temptation, and one that too many conductors succumb to. The character dances actually have character, which sounds like a minimum requirement but is rarer than it should be. The faster numbers crackle. The slower ones breathe.
This is not a perfect Nutcracker. Act One’s rougher passages keep it from the very top tier. But it is a thoughtful, often radiant one — and in a repertory littered with lazy seasonal product, that distinction counts for a great deal.
