Performance Analysis Of Pletnev's Adaptation Of The Nutcracker Suit

Mikhail Pletnev is a contemporary Russian musician,pianist,conductor and composer.He’s one of the most valuable music figures in the modern classical music world.He is an outstanding pianist,he has won various international piano competitions including The International Tchaikovsky Competition,where he performed his own transcription of Tchaikovsky’s ballet piece《Nutcracker》which is the object of this research.Since a very young age Pletnev had an enormous interest to Tchaikovsky’s music,he always loved to listen to and to perform it,however one of his beloved pieces 《Nutcracker》 didn’t have a transcription that would satisfy the needs of a professional pianist,all the transcriptions existed at the time had a lack of pianistic musical and technical vocabulary and were not independent piano performance pieces.So Pletnev has created his own transcription,he put together the most representative pieces of the ballet into the piano suite.In this research contains 3 chapters: Chapter 1 gives us a short introduction about Pletnev’s life and the background of composing the《Nutcracker》piano transcription suite;Chapter 2 describes the composition specifics of the 《Nutcracker》suite including musical form and harmony;Chapter 3 talks about the performance characteristics,gives a detailed description about different performing techniques used in this suite.