It’s Christmastime, so every ballet company is performing Chaikovsky’s Nutcracker. If ballet can be said to have a cash cow, this is it. It’s the one that pulls in all the families that never go to another ballet all year, and so earns the money that lets the ballet companies put on all those other shows that lose money the rest of the year.

That said, I’ve never seen a performance of The Nutcracker in the theater. It’s one of those things I’ve meant to do but just never got around to it. The truth is, I’m not a fan of ballet. I can enjoy a dance break in the middle of a production number in a musical, and for that matter I can even appreciate the ballet sequences in the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows like Carousel where they form part of the integrated tapestry of telling the larger story.

But two hours or more of pirouettes, pliés, and échappés? Not so much.

Still, a lot of the music for ballets is wonderful.

Most folks know the music to The Nutcracker Suite, which is just a small sampling of the treats in the whole score.

So to continue my Christmas series, here are three, count ’em three, versions of the complete music from Chaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet.

First up, for those balletophobes, here is the orchestral score, sans dancers, performed by Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

Next is a fully staged performance from the New York City Ballet from 2011. The bit where the Christmas tree grows to 41 feet tall occurs at about 35:50, in case that’s what you want to see. It’s not nearly as impressive on the small screen as it probably is in the theater.

Finally, for something a bit different, here is a computer simulated piano version of the score. It sounds pretty good (but then I like the sound of pianos, even computer simulated ones), and the only problem I have with what I watched is the creator still calls it the “Suite” when it’s the whole score, not the suite. Oh, well. I guess a lifetime of hearing “TheNutcrackerSuite” and it begins to sound like one word.