The Nutcracker with Petr Popelka. A concert for the whole family

Concert from 16:00

Concert from 19:00

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, selection from the ballet

Petr Popelka conductor
Czech Radio Children’s Choir
Věra Hrdinková choirmaster

Most of the works of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the first Russian professional composer and the next founding figure of Russian national musical culture after Glinka, are intensely urgent, emotionally rich, passionate and melancholic, and magically romantic. He managed to bridge the two hitherto contradictory tendencies of Russian music and combine the positive aspects of both possible approaches – that of the conservative advocates of Western musical models and the vision of the radical Mighty Handful, who emphasised national feeling and sought unique means of musical expression. He visited Prague three times, twice accompanied by Antonín Dvořák. It was in Prague that the opera Eugene Onegin was performed for the first time outside Russia, as well as the complete ballet The Nutcracker later in 1908. Tchaikovsky’s legacy extends to music both absolute and programmatic, chamber and symphonic... and in musical theatre as strongly to opera as to ballet. The Nutcracker, a score premiered in St. Petersburg in 1892, is a fairy tale based on a theme by the German Romanticist Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann from 1816. A little girl wakes up by the Christmas tree with a nutcracker figure in her lap.

She dreamed that they were together in a fairy-tale world where almost anything was possible; the Nutcracker overcame the Mouse King and turned into a beautiful prince... Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker brought new, perhaps even provocative, extraordinarily musical and melodically intoxicating music to the ballet world. Today, ballet is one of the symbols of Christmas.

Ticket prices: CZK 200

The organiser reserves the right to changes in the list of scheduled performers.