Georges Bizet: The Carmen Project

Description

I’m scared of Bizet“, was Dmitri Shostakovich’s answer, when prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya turned for help with her lifelong dream: to create a CARMEN ballet. “You’ll be disappointed no matter what you write.”. The next composer to decline the nonsensical idea was Aram Khachaturyan. Composer No.3 was found more accidentally: it was Rodion Shchedrin, who happened to be Plisetskaya’s husband. He wrote the entire score to the ballet’s movements and rhythms in only twenty days. Shchedrin called it “An arrangement of Bizet’s CARMEN for strings and percussion”. The composer, by his own admission, limited the orchestra to strings and percussion for two reasons: the strings compensate for the lack of human voices, and the percussion instruments underscore the choreography. And here comes the link to the actual album version: Igor Ponomarenko, an inspired alto Domra player and graduate from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, arranged - based on the model of Shchedrin's percussion-driven transformation - a very special reading of the Carmen Suite for his "Double Duet" MA.GR.IG.AL.."