The Nutcracker Suite, The Invincible Czars (Above Suspicion)

Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky is quite the pop star among classical composers, with numerous "hits" to his credit, including "The 1812 Overture" (and how many patriotic Americans know a dad-blamed Roosky wrote this piece often performed for the Fourth of July?), "Swan Lake," "The Sleeping Beauty," and his now-associated-with-Christmas opus "The Nutcracker Suite." It's so popular that you have to be pretty far into the woods not to be able to take in a live performance within commuting distance of your home sometime between mid-November and New Year's Day. Of course, most performances tend to be fairly literal readings of the score, with a few of the more adventurous jurisdictions offering George Balanchine's famous choreography to go with it. For those looking for a little holiday spice with their cracked nuts, the Invincible Czars, pride of Austin, Texas, have obliged with their more irreverent, rock-jazz-country-Latin-tinged arrangement, which they've performed for charity every year since 2004 and released on disc in 2007. I'm just catching up with it now, and though I'm not a Nutcracker maven, I can assure you the Czars do justice to the work of old Mother Russia's favorite son. It takes some serious chops to put down something like this, though, so not surprisingly, these folks are mainstays of Austin's serious and academic musical scene -- they just manage to do a decent job of keeping that news from the listener. Though it's billed as a "rock" version of the classic ballet, this isn't the two-guitars-bass-drums version -- the Czars take a more multilayered view of things, with a wide spread of instrumentation and a taste for throwing in everything from classic carols to square-dance rhythms. If you're in the Austin-Houston area, you might want to punt TSO and Mannheim this year and catch these folks instead.