This arrangement came about through an actual experience I had. I wanted to do a setting of some type of The Nutcracker ... which would include many of my favorites from the ballet -- and not just the typical ones we hear in the Suite. To refresh my memory, I decided to watch the entire ballet. Somewhere during the performance I fell asleep. I blame my age. While I was sleeping, I was dreaming a few of the melodies in quite different settings. When I woke up, the ballet was still going. This experience serves as the premise for this chart.
We start out with a Godfather-like setting of The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairies, followed by Waltz of the Flowers done in two styles. First, that of a Rogers and Hammerstein-style waltz; then a slow Copland-ish setting. This concludes the fantasia (my dreaming) portion of this chart. The rest of it is literal, so literal that all the key are the original keys from the composer's score. This resulted in a lot of key changes, a lot of transition composing in the style of Tchaikovsky, and quite a bit of groaning and moaning from the performers. Just imagine if I had transposed everything in band-friendly keys. Some poor trumpet player would have shown up for an orchestral audition, be given Le Chocolat to sight-read, and would end up saying something like, "Hey, wait a minute. Isn't this supposed to be in B-flat?"
These are my program Notes from the liner notes of Klavier CD
"Jingle Them Bells"
Perusal score
