Bolshoi Ballet

Arthur Fiedler's recording of Shchedrin's Carmen Ballet is excellent in every way. The composer's imaginative rescoring of several sections of Bizet's opera for strings and percussion is a superb reorchestration exploiting a full range of percussion timbre that reveals an incredible array of views of the score that continually delight the listener. The Ballet, composed as a vehicle for his celebrated wife- prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet, Maya Plisetskaya - is an extraordinary orchestration which invites the listener to explore new and very different colors with music originally scored for Bizet's classically constituted orchestra of the opera pit. While the disk also includes the Incidental Music to "Hamlet" by Shostakovich and Glazunov's Carnival Overture, it's the Shchedrin performance that makes the disk worth any price for the listener who values discovering new things in music well known in an earlier guise.

Tchaikovsky’s ballet in a new production for the reopening of the historic Bolshoi Ballet stage. It also celebrates superstar David Hallberg's Bolshoi debut, the first American principal soloist ever to be hired by the Bolshoi Ballet. The choreographer, Yuri Grigorovich presents a new version of his most famous choreography for a breath taking experience in splendid sets designed by Ezio Frigerio and more than 400 new costumes designed by Franca Squarciapino.

This 2 CD set of Shostakovich's Ballet Suites and film music is a treasure. If you have yet to hear the Ballet Suites, do give this a listen. This is Shostakovich at his most genial and witty. Much credit must be given to the man who compiled and arranged these suites: Levon Atovmyan. Atovmyan is the man responsible for not only arranging these ballet Suites. He also arranged most of Shostakovich's film scores into concert suites. As much as I love Shostakovich's original work, these Atovmyan arrangements are even better. Much of the material used in the Ballet Suites was salvaged from one of Shostakovich's most unipsired works, the ballet The Limpid Stream.