Rodion Shchedrin

This new CD from BR-KLASSIK features the ballet music 'Carmen Suite', based on the famous melodies from George Bizet's eponymous opera and masterfully arranged and adapted by the composer Rodion Shchedrin in 1968, and Ottorino Respighi's well-known symphonic poem 'Pini di Roma' (The Pines of Rome), written in 1924. The name of the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin is primarily associated in the West with his 'Carmen Suite', which has been highly popular ever since its first performance. The thirteen movements of this ballet music are based on Bizet's opera Carmen, and carefully adapted to the musical language of the present day.

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.

Shchedrin's Carmen Ballet, a hit in the 1960s, still amuses, delights, entertains, and, for some, enrages. It's full of Bizet's great melodies, but instead of a fancy-dress version of great hits from Carmen, Shchedrin's reorchestration features extravagant percussion effects and fascinating original variations. So it's a truly original work in the long line of parody pieces central to 20th century music, including the reworking of Baroque music by Stravinsky, Respighi, and others. Pletnev and his fine orchestra play the daylights out of it, and the engineers make the most of its "hi-fi spectacular" potential. The Concertos for Orchestra are welcome fillers. The first, subtitled "Naughty Limericks," sounds like music to accompany a riotous cartoon. The second, "Chimes," is made of sterner stuff, with some dazzling trumpet and percussion passages in its middle section and an extended finale for bells and a dark-textured orchestra. This is one of those discs you can't go wrong with.