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On a darker note: San Francisco Ballet''s new music director Andrew Mogrelia has a love affair with Tchaikovsky that puts The Nutcracker at the top of the composer''s achievements.

Article Excerpt
DO WE PAY ENOUGH attention to the score of The Nutcracker--the one by Tchaikovsky? Many of the folks who will attend perfomances of the ballet this month all around the country consider the score just another agreeably tuneful bonus for attending an annual ritual. Others deem it the sound in the pit that drives the blizzard of pirouettes a la seconde on the stage. A substantial number of people even think that that sound is called The Nutcracker Suite. Ask the man who conducts it and the response is infinitely more positive. "I can cross my heart and say I am never bored. There is something to find on every page of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker and something different in every performance," says Andrew Mogrelia. "The score teems with energy and invention. You can constantly rethink the way you phrase, the way you balance, the way you pace it."

Appointed San Francisco Ballet's music director and principal conductor last May, Mogrelia knows whereof he speaks. Although over the past eighteen years he has conducted 165 performances in three countries of the Petipa/Ivanov holiday classic (to be sure, a measly amount compared to the 3,000 performances claimed by Mogrelia's SFB predecessor, the late Denis De Coteau), he has done Nutcracker in five productions (the most...

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