The wish of the great ballet dancer Maya Plisetskaya, to incarnate the tremendous and attractive image of Carmen on a ballet stage, became both an inner impulse and an outer reason to write “Carmen-Suite”. Rodion Shchedrin chose Bizet’s music as the basis for incarnating this image as he believed that the links between the character created by Merime and immortal music of the famous French composer stayed immortal in the minds of numerous generations of the listeners. Finding it impossible to “raise an objection” against it by composing new musical material in addition to Bizet, Rodion Shchedrin, deeply enchanted by Ibis music, chose the path of orchestral transcription. As the result, the collaboration between Shchedrin and Bizet is born.
The high artistic and emotional grade of Shchedrin’s talent, open up here with a peculiar, mighty and conquering force. The musicians recorded on this disc understood this as the most important quality of this music and carefully, as a gift, presented it to us, listeners.
Bolshoi Theatre Percussion Ensemble: Viktor Grishin, Sergei Vetrov, Alexei Ogorodnikov, Sergei Prozorov, Viktor Shubinsky.
