The night before our trip to Manhattan for the New York Theatre Ballet’s abbreviated Nutcracker last Sunday, I came across, on Netflix, the 1986 film version with the Pacific Northwest Ballet and the London Symphony Orchestra.

To cut down the ballet to a child-friendly one hour, the New York Theatre Ballet omitted the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, so I thought I’d post the clip from Nutcracker: The Motion Picture here; Kadoty86 has a number of scenes on her YouTube channel. The dancer is Patricia Barker, who retired back in 2007 as a favorite of many dance fans in Seattle.

The NYBT production we saw with the children the next day was precious, in a good way. The choreography made it easy to follow the story while also giving the dancers lots of room to show their stuff. It was a young group that danced with verve; my daughter was transfixed.

The only distraction was the tinny recorded music. I know that the company can’t afford a full band, but surely someone can put together a good chamber version that would be affordable and engaging.

But if you want to give your children the Nutcracker experience, this is the one. It’s short, pretty, and good.

Back in March, the Honolulu Symphony filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (as the Louisville Orchestra recently did) to get out from under their debt. Today, the board acknowledged that the financial weight was overwhelming when they asked a US bankruptcy court to change their status to Chapter 7 and let them liquidate all assets. The judge granted the request.

There was a whole lot of nothin’ going on in Detroit today, but yesterday in Charleston it looks as if the orchestra will be up and running again.

Although the Charleston Symphony Orchestra board and musicians reached a contract agreement last week, they hadn’t settled the sticky matter of a National Labor Review Board complaint that the musicians’ union had filed against the orchestra for stopping work last March.

Yesterday, as reported on the Charleston Post and Courier website, the union will drop the complaint in return for musician control over 23% of the board seats. As constituted, that means that the musicians will nominate members to hold 5 of 21 seats. They had asked for 10.

They had also asked that the board president and negotiating chair resign; no word on whether that will happen.

The Charleston Symphony lost 12 musicians in this contract–they’re down to only 24–and their base pay is now only $14,000. But hopefully, the musicians now can feel as if they have a voice, some degree of agency over their own situation. I wouldn’t want to be at the next board meeting, though.

It ends up that Hungarian composer Bela Bartok lived in the Bronx, just down the street from where I live now. Small world, eh?

After leaving Europe to avoid the Nazis, Bartok settled in Forest Hills, Queens in 1940. The next year, he crossed the Harlem River to Cambridge Avenue in Riverdale. Apparently, the well-treed parks of the neighborhood put the composer at ease and reminded him of Budapest; he stayed for three years before moving to 57th Street, close to Carnegie Hall. He passed in 1945.

While in Riverdale, Bartok worked for Columbia University as a researcher–he was a renowned collector of Hungarian folk music–and also composed his most famous work, the Concerto for Orchestra, which the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered in 1944. Here’s the last movement:

You can hear snippets of this piece and get a little background on NPR.org.