Yesterday I caught up on a project that had been put off since probably before the holidays. DR Elmore had recommended the Robert Irving/NYC Ballet Orchestra recording of The Nutcracker, and I found the reel-to-reel tape on Discogs. We wondered if there were cuts made on the tape as opposed to the LP. It is indeed a very full reel of tape. Belatedly, yesterday was the day to get out the score and listen to it at last.
There are eight short "judicious" cuts made where there's sufficient repetition within a passage to get away with it. We're talking literally eight bars or so, each, and not in the popular excerpts. The one lack of a repeat where I know I would have detected something possibly amiss without following the score is the "Tempo di Gross-Vater" where we have the stately 3/8 theme followed by the quick 2/4...and the recording goes on without going back to the 3/8. That's always been a distinctive moment to my ears, and I do miss that one.
Three other written repeats not taken are in Act II, Scene 10 (in the Dover score these are the first-endings on pages 271 and 285) and in "The Apotheosis" (page 505). This all amounts to just the shaving of - what, a minute? - off the recording, and listening through headphones I didn't detect any edits in those spots. I wonder if the LP is the same, or even if any of those are traditional cuts - although I wonder why they would be. Or was this done to literally help prevent the tape from spilling off the reel? Don't you love a good mystery?
