Arthur Fiedler and The Boston Pops - Bizet-Shchedrin: Carmen Ballet; Shostakovich: Hamlet, incidental music; Glazunov: Carnaval Overture (1999)
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue & Log) ~ 354 Mb | Total time: 67:58 | Scans included
Classical | Label: RCA Red Seal | 09026-63308-2 | Recorded: 1968, 1969
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue & Log) ~ 354 Mb | Total time: 67:58 | Scans included
Classical | Label: RCA Red Seal | 09026-63308-2 | Recorded: 1968, 1969
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.