Sugar-Plum Swing

Christmas is often the time for a trip to the ballet, and this concert will take you there; albeit with a bit of a twist! In 1960, the great jazz band leader Duke Ellington and his regular collaborator Billy Strayhorn took the music (and movement titles!) of Tchaikovsky’s ballet suite The Nutcracker and made it swing. This concert’s concerto, Luck, commissioned by the Ulster Orchestra for Matilda Lloyd, starts with string and wind flurries like snowflakes, that melt into a playful, buoyant work for trumpet and orchestra that keeps jazz-inflections to the fore. The concert closes with selections from another of Tchaikovsky’s peerless compositions for the ballet, the romantic tragedy, Swan Lake.