Tchaikovsky: The Sleeping Beauty - A Dramatic Symphony Baltic Sea Philharmonic & Kristjan Järvi

• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893): The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Introduction:
• 1 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Introduction 02:19
• The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I:
• 2 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: March 1 02:43
• 3 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Dancing Scene: Entrance of the Fairies 02:02
• 4 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Pas de Six 01:27
• 5 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Crystal Fountain Fairy 00:16
• 6 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Enchanted Garden Fairy 00:09
• 7 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Breadcrumb Fairy 00:32
• 8 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Fairy of the Songbirds 00:30
• 9 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Violante (Fairy of Ardent Strong Passions) 00:46
• 10 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Lilac Fairy 02:29
• 11 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Carabosse (The Bad Fairy) 00:46
• 12 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Scene (Aurora's 16th Birthday/Scene of the Knitters) 03:52
• 13 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Garland Waltz 01:52
• 14 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Aurora is introduced to the Suitors 00:44
• 15 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Rose Adagio 02:45
• 16 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Dance of the Maids of Honour and Pages 00:28
• 17 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Aurora's Variation 1 01:58
• 18 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Code 1 00:36
• 19 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act I: Finale (Charm) 00:50
• The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II:
• 20 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Introduction (Prince Désiré's Hunting Party) 01:16
• 21 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Blind Man's Buff 01:20
• 22 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Dance of the Duchesses 00:33
• 23 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Dance of the Baronesses 00:33
• 24 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Dance of the Marchionesses 00:25
• 25 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Farandole (Scene) 00:15
• 26 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Dance (Mazurka) 01:46
• 27 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Desiré and the Lilac Fairy 00:35
• 28 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Pas d'Action: Desiré sees Aurora 02:25
• 29 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Aurora's Variation 2 00:18
• 30 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Coda 2 00:55
• 31 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Panorama 00:41
• 32 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Entr'acte 01:31
• 33 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Symphonic Entr'acte. Sleep 01:37
• 34 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act II: Finale: Aurora's Awakening 01:08
• The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III:
• 35 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: March 2 00:21
• 36 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Polonaise 01:49
• 37 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Pas de Quatre 1 00:32
• 38 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: The Silver Fairy 00:42
• 39 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: The Sapphire Fairy 00:41
• 40 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: The Diamond Fairy 01:22
• 41 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Puss-in-Boots and the White Cat 00:45
• 42 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Pas de Quatre 2 00:42
• 43 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Cinderella and Prince Fortuné 00:29
• 44 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: The Blue Bird and Princess Florine 01:31
• 45 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf 00:30
• 46 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Cinderella and Her Prince 02:13
• 47 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Tom Thumb, His Brothers and the Ogre 01:08
• 48 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Pas de Deux: Entrance 02:36
• 49 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Prince Desiré 00:52
• 50 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Aurora 00:39
• 51 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Pas de Deux: Coda 01:16
• 52 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Sarabande 01:53
• 53 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Finale 02:19
• 54 The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66: Act III: Apotheosis 03:43
• Total Runtime 01:08:25

Info for Tchaikovsky: The Sleeping Beauty - A Dramatic Symphony

The Baltic Sea Philharmonic’s latest album Sleeping Beauty will be released on 13 November. The new Sony Classical recording sees Kristjan Järvi conducting the orchestra in his own arrangement of Tchaikovksy’s fairytale ballet Sleeping Beauty. Condensing and transforming the near three-hour score into a dramatic symphony of around 70 minutes, Järvi gives new life to this most iconic of theatre music compositions. The musicians of the Baltic Sea Philharmonic performed this version of Sleeping Beauty entirely from memory during their March 2019 ‘Nordic Pulse’ tour of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Russia, and the album was recorded in St. Petersburg at the end of the tour. Playing the score by heart transformed the musicians into storytellers who felt like they were telling the fairytale for the first time.

From ballet to dramatic symphony

The new album follows in the spirit of Järvi’s previous Tchaikovsky releases on Sony – The Snow Maiden and Swan Lake – in reshaping sublime fairytale pieces for contemporary audiences. Järvi believes that masterworks such as Sleeping Beauty have lost some of their appeal in the theatre world with the evolution of technology. ‘Great music will always remain great music,’ he says, ‘but it constantly needs to be updated and modernised, not only interpreted. Making a dramatic symphony from a ballet is a step in this direction of constant reinvention.’

The Baltic Sea Philharmonic is the perfect partner for Järvi’s enterprising reinvention of Tchaikovsky’s music. The ensemble is constantly renewing the musical heritage of the Nordic lands around the Baltic Sea, and furthermore is reimagining what an orchestra can be in today’s society. Challenging classical music conventions, the Baltic Sea Philharmonic creates unique concert experiences that fuse sound, light, visual art and technology, and performs entire programmes from memory, with the musicians able to stand, move and interact more freely with each other, the conductor and the audience.

Storytelling and the art of memorisation

The musicians of the Baltic Sea Philharmonic were no strangers to memorising complex scores when they started working on Järvi’s version of Sleeping Beauty ahead of the ‘Nordic Pulse’ tour in early 2019. However, for many of the players, this was the longest piece of music they had ever memorised. Adding to the challenge posed by the music’s duration, some of the many sections in Järvi’s adaptation were unlabelled in the score, offering the players no mental connection with characters or moments from the ballet. However, Polish principal violist Marzena Malinowska came up with a solution that helped both her and other musicians in the orchestra memorise the complete score. ‘I knew I needed to make more connections and signposts in the score to be able to memorise the music,’ she says. ‘So I added titles for the untitled sections, sourcing them from the original fairytale but mostly from the ballet itself. Adding in the names of dances, or of the other fairytale characters from Act III, helped complete the picture in my mind, and gave me a route to follow.’

Memorising the score and playing it by heart turned the musicians into storytellers who felt like they were telling this famous fairytale for the first time. ‘Performing from memory changed our relationship with Tchaikovsky’s music,’ says Malinowska. ‘When you’re playing ballets and operas in an orchestra you’re usually hidden in the pit, and the stars of the show are the dancers or singers, who are responsible for telling the story and making it strong. We knew it was our responsibility to be the storytellers. In that moment you feel incredibly connected to each other on stage, and to the audience. And you feel creative: you don’t feel that you’re recreating something that has been done hundreds of times already.’

A burgeoning Sony Classical discography

Sleeping Beauty joins the Baltic Sea Philharmonic’s growing discography on Sony Classical. The orchestra and Järvi’s first recording for the label, released in September 2016, was The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure, an arrangement for orchestra of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In May of this year Sony Classical released an album of Stravinsky and Glass violin concertos featuring the young Swiss violinist David Nebel in his debut concerto recording, with Järvi conducting the Baltic Sea Philharmonic in Stravinsky’s neoclassical Violin Concerto in D major and the London Symphony Orchestra in Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1. Gramophone praised Nebel’s interpretation of the Stravinsky and the energetic playing of the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, with the magazine’s reviewer concluding: ‘This is a tremendously impressive debut album, and the Stravinsky performance is among the very best.’

Baltic Sea Philharmonic
Kristjan Järvi, conductor

Kristjan Järvi
lives and breathes music, using its power to create spaces in which anything is possible. Kristjan Järvi pursues his pioneering ideas as a conductor, producer, composer and arranger. Embracing everything with creative entrepreneurship. he runs his own production company Sunbeam Productions.

‘Kristjan Järvi has earned a reputation as one of the canniest, and most innovative, programmers on the classical scene’ (Reuters). As a conductor, he is at home on the big international stages, directing great classics from Wagner to Tchaikovsky and from Steve Reich to Radiohead as well as his original productions without any genre boundaries.

Kristjan Järvi developed his own unique sound with his New York based, classical-hip-hop-jazz group Absolute Ensemble, Baltic Sea Philharmonic, and Sunbeam´s in-house Band ‘Nordic Pulse’. Kristjan shapes his artistic life and takes expression to the next level with his team of ’Sunbeam Productions´’, with whom he creates a new paradigm for multi-sensory performance Xperiences. At the end of 2020 Kristjan founded a new record label: “nEscapes”. Besides online music distribution it offers its own unique “nEscapes Lounges” to artists as a new listening format.

Besides his own productions, Kristjan Järvi collaborates internationally with outstanding artists like director Tom Tykwer (for the soundtrack of Babylon Berlin) and recording artists like MUM, Bryce Dessner (The National), Hauschka, Robot Koch and Max Richter and is staring in the “Bastille Re-Orchestrated” Documentary on Amazon Prime at the moment.

Kristjan is exclusively signed as a composer and producer with BMG Music under its label “Modern recordings”. His latest album is called: Nordic Escapes.

Born in Estonia, Kristjan Järvi emigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in New York City. Kristjan comes from a family of great conductors. His father Neeme and his elder brother Paavo both conduct the greatest orchestras in the world. In 2015, Kristjan relocated his center of life from the USA back to the capital of Estonia, Tallinn.

Booklet for Tchaikovsky: The Sleeping Beauty - A Dramatic Symphony