Mikhail Pletnev - Shchedrin: Carmen Suite

Numbered edition limited to 1,000 copies

Limited edition K2 HD Mastering Japanese import CD!

In 1967, Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin composed his one-act ballet, "Carmen Suite", for his wife, ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. The music, taken from the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet and arranged for strings and percussion, is not a 19th century pastiche but rather 'a creative meeting of the minds', as Shchedrin put it, with Bizet's melodies reclothed in a variety of fresh instrumental colors (including the frequent use of percussion), set to new rhythms and often phrased with a great deal of sly wit. Initially banned by the Soviet hierarchy as "disrespectful" to the opera for precisely these qualities, the ballet has since become Shchedrin's best-known work and has remained popular in the West as what reviewer James Sanderson of All Music Guide calls "an iconoclastic but highly entertaining retelling of Bizet's opera."