69^th CONCERT SEASON

december 2025 • Classical FavoUrites Series

Saturday, December 13, 2025 • 7:30pm | Regent Theatre Oshawa

NUTCRACKER • A HOLIDAY SEASON TRADITION!

Iconic, quintessential, the magic of Tchaikovsky’s celebrated Nutcracker returns to Ontario Philharmonic • This magisterial ballet for the Holiday Season is presented in its full orchestral version with engaging multimedia projections, giving you the opportunity to follow the story plot while immersed in the glorious sounds of the orchestra • OP welcomes Music Director of the State Opera of Altenburg-Gera (Germany) and the Israel Chamber Orchestra, conductor Ruben Gazarian, marking his Canadian debut on this occasion.

Piotr Ilyich TCHAIKOVSKY

The Nutcracker, Op.71 • The celebrated ballet score in Concert-Version
Guest Conductor: Ruben Gazarian
• With image projections by Alain Sauvion
Act I

INTERMISSION

Act II

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RUBEN GAZARIAN • biography

Ruben Gazarian is the General Music Director of the Theater Altenburg Gera since the 2020/2021 season. After four successful seasons, his contract has been extended for a further three years – until summer 2027.

Gazarian is also the designated Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Israel Chamber Orchestra, starting his tenure in Israel in September 2024. Ruben Gazarian’s work in Tel Aviv will run parallel to his GMD position in Germany. Before that, he was for sixteen years – from2002 to 2018 – the Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the renowned Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn. In more than 860 concerts and 26 CD productions, he enriched the standard repertory of the orchestra by regularly expanding it to symphonic dimensions. In recognition of his achievements during the long Heilbronn tenure, he was awarded the Golden Coin of the city in2018. Parallel to his position in Heilbronn, at the beginning of 2015 Ruben Gazarian became principal conductor and artistic director of the Georgian Chamber Orchestra Ingolstadt. His Ingolstadt tenure ended after six seasons in December 2020.

As guest conductor Ruben Gazarian has directed such renowned orchestras as Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR, WDR-Sinfonieorchester Köln, hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt, Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, Kassel State Theater Orchestra, Deutsches-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Frankfurt Museum Orchestra (Frankfurt Opera Orchestra), Hessian State Orchestra Wiesbaden, Northwest German Philharmonic Herford, Orchestre National de Lyon, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Haifa Symphony Orchestra, Tel Aviv Opera Orchestra (Rishon LeZion Orchestra), Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, Zurich Chamber Orchestra and many others. All German radio stations as well as Radio SvizzeraItaliana, Radio France Musique, Radio Denmark (DR, Danmarks Radio) and several other European stations have recorded numerous of his concerts with various orchestras.

Gazarian works successfully with acclaimed musicians such as Khatia Buniatishvili, Gautier and Renaud Capuçon, Julia Fischer, Hilary Hahn, Katia & Marielle Labèque, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Sabine Meyer, Viktoria Mullova, Sergey Nakariakov, Gerhard Oppitz, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Julian Rachlin, Frank Peter Zimmermann, the Beaux Arts Trio, the Gewandhaus-Quartet and several others. The vast discography documents the extent of Gazarians repertoire and the quality of his interpretations, born of meticulous rehearsal work, profound emotional understanding and firm mastery over a broad range of periods and styles.

PROGRAM NOTES
by John Green‍

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
The Nutcracker
This great Russian composer needs little introduction. There is not a music lover alive that won’t recognize most, if not all, of his famous melodies. They have been revised and modified for everything from movie backgrounds to television commercials and cartoons, even as product endorsements. Perhaps the most recognizable of all his enormous outpouring is the music of the ever-popular Christmas ballet The Nutcracker with its sugar plum fairies and waltzing flowers. Volumes have been written about this wonderful score performed literally thousands of times each year around he world.

Tchaikovsky completed The Nutcracker score in 1892, the year it was first presented in St Petersburg. The plot is an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's 1844 short story The Nutcracker, itself a retelling of E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King about a girl who befriends a nutcracker that comes to life on Christmas Eve and wages a battle against the evil Mouse King.

The story of The Nutcracker’s genesis has told us that right from the beginning Tchaikovsky was never happy with the work’s music or idea. He complained about “the prospect of…wearisome work, agonizing effort” and composition that is “colorless, dry, hasty, and wretched.” If it had not been for his publisher saving the score from destruction, the now universally loved The Nutcracker would never have seen the light of day. Its wonderful melodies permeate the world’s concert halls year after year.

An interesting side note, besides the composer’s attention to tone colour was his insistence on using the celesta—a new instrument of his day constructed from a steel bar and played from a keyboard.

69th CONCERT SEASON